The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 390, titled:
Aquarius in Astrology: Meaning and Traits
With Chris Brennan and guests Aerin Fogel and Bear Ryver
Episode originally released on February 15, 2023
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Andrea Johnson
Transcription released February 15, 2023
Copyright © 2023 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode we’re gonna be doing a deep dive into the meaning of the zodiac sign Aquarius in astrology. So joining me today are astrologers Aerin Fogel and Bear Ryver. Welcome both of you.
BEAR RYVER: Thanks for having me.
AERIN FOGEL: Thanks for having me.
CB: Yeah, thanks for joining me again on, I think, your second or third time here on the podcast, this time to do Aquarius. And this is the 11th entry in this series on the signs of the zodiac and sometimes we start by talking about the credentials of each of the persons participating. So what are each of your Aquarius ‘street cred’ credentials for the purpose of this show?
AF: So I have Sun in Aquarius and it’s my sect light. And I also have Mercury in Aquarius.
CB: Nice. Sun and Mercury, that’s pretty good. Bear, what about you?
BR: I have the Moon in Aquarius and it is also my sect light and my chart ruler as well.
CB: Nice. Good. I am similar. I have the Moon and the rising sign or Ascendant in Aquarius. So Moon and rising in Aquarius and this is the last of the series of episodes where I have something in that sign after doing nine episodes where I had nothing in the sign, so this will be a good one. All right, so where do we start? So usually we start by contrasting. What I’ve been noticing and what I’ve been talking about a lot in this series is how as you’re going through the signs of the zodiac, each sign seems to have a sort of corrective function over the sign that came before it. And usually this is connected with some of the primary properties of the sign that have to do with either the qualities or the rulerships, the planetary rulerships of that sign. So let me start first by just reading off some of the basic qualities of Aquarius.
So this is Aquarius, for the video viewers, and the symbol for Aquarius. Aquarius is traditionally said to be a masculine or diurnal sign. It’s said to be an air sign. It’s connected with the element of air in terms of the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water. And it’s said to be a fixed sign in terms of modality or quadruplicity, in terms of the modalities of cardinal, fixed, and mutable because it falls in the middle of a specific season. In this instance, it’s in the middle of the winter season, in the part of that season that falls just after the first part, which was Capricorn after the winter solstice. So in terms of planetary rulerships Aquarius is said to be the sign of the domicile or the home or dwelling place traditionally of the planet Saturn, and it’s said to be the sign of the detriment or the antithesis of the Sun because Aquarius is the sign exactly opposite to the ruling sign of the Sun, which is Leo; which in the northern hemisphere, Leo is the middle of the summer vs. Aquarius, which is the middle of the winter.
So going back to my zodiac illustration here, we can see that while there’s some continuity between Capricorn and Aquarius—because they’re both signs that are ruled by Saturn—there is a major shift in terms of all the rest of the qualities: whereas Capricorn is a cardinal sign, Aquarius is a fixed sign; whereas Capricorn is an earth sign, Aquarius is an air sign; and whereas Capricorn is a feminine sign or nocturnal sign, Aquarius is said to be masculine or diurnal sign. So there’s some continuity, but also some major, major differences. What are some of the things that come up for either of you when you think of Aquarius on its own, or where you think of it relative to Capricorn?
AF: Yeah, I think about all three of the last zodiac signs as collective signs. And so, part of the transition for me between Capricorn and Aquarius is what we are doing with collective information or shared experiences like on a larger level. And I often think about Capricorn as a ladder. It’s directional, it can be upward-oriented. It may be more focused. The cardinality gives us a sense that it’s in motion vs. Aquarius, which is more of a network or a web of something that is interconnected and sustaining. There’s a sense that everything within it is on the same level or has this intention of equity behind it. So I think of that transition as moving from this upwards-moving ladder into more of an interconnected web.
CB: That makes sense. I like that keyword of ‘interconnectedness’ ‘cause this is the third instance that we’ve met an air sign: the first two, with Mercury and Gemini, which is very much about communication, and then there was Libra, which is a Venus-ruled air sign, which had more of a social component. With Aquarius, we get into similar things in terms of a similar social or communicative component.
BR: Yeah. Yeah, I really like what you said Aerin about taking Capricorn through Pisces together as a group. That made me think about the wintertime. My ancestors on my mom’s side are Alaskan Native, and the wintertime is the time that’s reserved for telling the sacred stories. And in terms of Capricorn and Aquarius, I often think about those two different aspects of Saturn as the difference between learning how to make something of your culture from your ancestors or from your grandparents, like the wisdom you gain on their knee being very earthy like Capricorn vs. forward-thinking social norms and that communicative aspect that is oriented towards thinking forward seven generations. And so, that quality of drying out the potentially sentimental, ‘my family, my ancestors’, these particular object qualities that can come with Capricorn and orienting more towards our culture, what makes us sustain, what makes us capable to be fixed in the Aquarian way.
AF: That was beautiful. I love the aspect of Aquarius season as a storytelling time; that feels really fitting as well. And I’ve even been thinking about Capricorn and Aquarius in their different orientation to time itself, especially with Saturn as the ruler, which is our ‘timekeeper’. And I think about Capricorn more as like a progression of time, which very much has to do with that aspect of ancestry and legacy that you were mentioning, Bear, and coming out of time as something that progresses or moves in a linear way towards the future into Aquarius where time and space don’t exist in a way, or time is also a network or something that is simultaneous and kind of has this larger context. And storytelling feels very much like that to me. It’s an expression that interconnects us with different moments in space and time.
CB: Yeah, I like that because Capricorn as an earth sign feels more focused on the which is material or concrete or has substance to it, like building a building, or building of the business or something like that vs. Aquarius, which is concrete sometimes can be ideas and narratives and stories and social structures. Even though they don’t have always a physical reality, there’s still something very tangible and very important about them that creates a foundation or a structure for society in general.
BR: Yeah, that material quality being like the mountain the sea-goat of Capricorn is climbing, it makes me think about geological time and the way that mountains turn into dirt eventually on a long enough timeline vs. Aquarius having that ‘air is everywhere’. It could be fractal; it could be holographic. But nothing moves faster than the speed of light, except maybe potentially an idea, or a meme, or a story, and they also can be truly immortal in a way that even mountains can’t be.
CB: It makes me think of the internet as well, which, on the one hand, is something that’s so theoretically impermanent. Like if the Sun sent out an EMP wave that just wiped out most of the computers in the world today, most of our current documentation of history and culture and society and social networks and everything that’s happened today would just be gone and would disappear as if it never existed. And yet, today, failing that stuff, all those communications, that huge communications network around the world that’s developed over the past 30 years has real tangible reality to all of us just by virtue of it existing and the way that it connects all of us through these different networks, and there’s something very Aquarian about that.
AF: Yeah, Aquarius is definitely connected to the internet, and WWW really came into fruition the last time Saturn was in Aquarius in the early ‘90s. And I think what you’re saying, Chris, is really relevant also to the transition from earth to air again. Because Capricorn is of the earth; the information that we have, in Capricorn, is in our bones; it’s in our geological earth and in our physical home. But in Aquarius that information exists in our minds and in our relationship to one another. And it’s ephemeral; it’s not something that is of tangible, 3D reality.
CB: Yeah. And there’s a sort of ambition to Capricorn, an upwards-mobility ambition to get to the top of things, or to get to the top of a mountain. And with Aquarius I feel like it can be similarly ambitious to a certain extent, but it’s more ambitious in the field of ideas or the field of ideology. And as a fixed sign, a fixed air sign, I feel like sometimes, on the one hand, while Aquarius is often associated with rejecting social convention, sometimes it can also be the most ideologically fixed in terms of once it establishes a belief and being very adamant about that belief or that ideology, whatever that is. Which is kind of an interesting contradiction in terms of being an air sign, which is usually more free flowing in other instances, like Gemini, which is a very light, airy sign. But here, things get heavier, thoughts get more serious, and views or opinions get a little bit more fixed.
BR: Yeah, I think comparing the three air signs, Gemini being Mercury’s air sign, it is very light, flirty, and social, and it’s sufficient to just talk about it, and Libra’s Venusian qualities are so relational, but then Aquarius is Saturnian. So it’s about taking those ideas and setting them into stone, whether that’s in the way that society is structured, or whether that’s literally codifying things in stone. Making things permanent I think is a really important feature of the sign.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right, so other things when it comes to this sign that are really important in terms of basic qualities, so we’re talking about a contrast with Saturn. I mean, I know that’s a major issue and discrepancy, and this is one of the first times—I guess aside from Scorpio—where you do run into a discrepancy between modern vs. ancient astrology, where modern astrologers tend to associate the sign with Uranus, in ancient astrology, for the first 2,000 years, it tended to be associated with Saturn. And so, I’ve been doing more of a traditional take on the signs of the zodiac during this series, so we’ll be focusing on Saturn. And one of the things that sometimes comes up in that context is because it’s a fixed air sign—and you get that communicative quality, as well as sometimes a technological component that comes partially through Saturn being connected as an air sign and making communications more concrete—I think sometimes some of those traditional qualities with Aquarius can either get confused for Uranian significations or there can be a great deal of overlap that kind of explains how some of those still can make sense in a traditional context.
AF: Yeah, I think that a lot of the associations with Aquarius that people might think of sometimes as Uranian qualities actually have to do with the fact that Aquarius is the detriment of the Sun. And so, that’s where some of those qualities come from, which I know we’ll talk about at some point. But Uranus is erratic and fast-paced and wants change immediately, and those are not necessarily Aquarian qualities. Aquarius does not actually like the process of change; it just wants things to already be different, or already be in some kind of altered, better state. But Uranus is more involved with the process of change itself and has that kind of erraticism. But I did think it was funny that at the time that we started this recording Uranus was on the Ascendant, and so we were probably bound to talk about it anyways.
CB: Okay. Yeah, I had late Taurus rising here. I didn’t give the data, but it’s January 22, 2023, and we started about, what, 16 minutes ago. It’s 12:43 PM here. So that is funny. And I think one of the things that’s worth getting into now is how Aquarius is the sign that’s opposite to Leo, and Leo’s ruled by the Sun. Everything in the solar system revolves around the Sun, and the Sun has a way of setting social conventions sometimes or representing that which is sort of the norm that things normally revolve around; whereas Aquarius being opposite, and is ruled by Saturn, one of the primary functions of Saturn is saying ‘no’ to things or rejecting things.
And so, I think that becomes part of the conceptual reason why Aquarius can often be associated with rejection of social conventions because it’s part of that function of Saturn to say ‘no’ to things or to critique or criticize or stand out, not in the center, but instead around the periphery of things, and to stand outside and not be part of the in-crowd, and to be then sometimes a loner or unique or some of those other qualities, and to sometimes really identify itself with that; for Aquarius to have its self-identity very much wrapped up in not being the center of what’s common, but instead doing things that are somewhat unconventional or eccentric in that way.
BR: Yeah, one of the things I often use to anchor Saturn is to talk about Saturn’s exaltation in Libra actually and the word ‘discernment’, and the way that too much discernment can lead to discrimination. And what we’re really pointing at is the walls—who’s in, who’s out. Saturn, like you said, Chris, Saturn says ‘no’. And I think in Aquarius, with respect to groups and identity and that quality of identifying oneself by which group you’re not a part of, I think Aquarius can be oriented towards noticing that first—who doesn’t fit, who doesn’t belong, who’s not included—and so, is kind of progressive, radical.
I remember when I was really, really young this idea that Aquarius is the sign that roots for the underdog or fights for the underdog, and I think some people might associate that with a radical or revolutionary Uranian impulse. But I think that has to do with a Saturnian quality of being bound to those ideals. The Aquarian ‘fixedness’ comes in and then Saturn comes in and says, “I’m gonna chain myself to this idea completely. I am this thing.” And if that identity is oriented towards ‘these people should belong and they don’t presently’ then I think, to Aerin’s point, Aquarius is ready for that future where everyone is included to be here now. And so, that combination of qualities can look like Uranus, but I think it’s a lot of different subtle things going on with Aquarius itself.
AF: Absolutely, yeah. And you mentioned the aspect of both Saturn and Saturn’s signs as having a lot of discernment, and I think that that’s really key to both Capricorn and Aquarius. But discernment also makes me think of objectivity. In order to have discernment you need to be able to have enough of an objective sense of the many options that you are discerning between. And that’s very much an air sign experience, to me, to be able to step back and look at things objectively or look at things from some kind of bigger picture. But like you were saying, the challenge with Aquarius can come when that objectivity becomes over-objective, or when there is this sense of being disconnected or divorced from the actual reality at hand, which can lead to a perspective that might be more radical. Like when we are looking at everything equally and all possibility equally sometimes that can lead to a feeling of nihilism or anarchy or deep pessimism, and I think that’s where some of the disconnect can come in with Aquarius as well.
BR: Disconnect, that’s a good one. Dissociation is another word that came to mind as you were talking, yeah.
AF: Dissociation big time is the struggle for Aquarius.
BR: Yes.
AF: ‘Cause it’s beyond Capricorn’s bodily experience. Capricorn is of the body and of the earth and Aquarius is beyond the body. And I think that also gives rise to a lot of the really beautiful expressions of the sign because it gives Aquarius this capacity to go beyond cultural norms, physical norms, gender/sexuality norms and allows us to go beyond the kind of physical correlations that are there sometimes that might be more held in Capricorn. But then of course if we swing too far to the other end of the spectrum we can just become dissociated from our body or the physical earth itself that we’re part of.
BR: Yeah, I suspect we might get to some of those themes a bit later if we talk about any upcoming transits or current Aquarian vibes in the sky. But that made me think about being able to get so far away from the body that one might be really tempted to want to plug into an AI neural network ‘cause you don’t have to eat there or deal with any of that pesky bodily stuff. From the perspective of Aquarius, Capricorn becomes the 12th house. It’s like, “Oh, let me just forget about that stuff back there.”
AF: So true. I am wishing I had looked up their birthdays, but the creators of The Matrix, that movie feels so Aquarian to me because it’s like, “Well, we could just be brains in vats and that would be fine.” And there is a whole school of philosophy that is basically just an ongoing argument about whether or not we are actually just brains in vats and not actually bodies on the Earth—and it was probably started by Aquarians.
CB: Yeah, that’s such an Aquarian discussion. The central premise of The Matrix was just that you could be sitting eating somewhere at a fine restaurant, and you’re enjoying the food, but it’s just that a computer is sending messages to your brain telling you that you’re enjoying that. And so, therefore, you have the perception of it, even if your body is actually not there and is off somewhere else not experiencing that. So what is that? What’s at the core of that? I think I said the core of that is the ability of Aquarius to focus on both technology, but also the mind, and even science to a certain extent. Aquarius is kind of like a scientific sign.
And part of what comes with that that I think is really important is understanding Aquarius in terms of the qualities, the original Stoic qualities; that it’s a cold sign that’s opposite to Leo, which is a hot, fire sign. And sometimes with Aquarius, both for good and bad, it can be associated with this cold quality or this sort of coldness, which can sometimes come through as emotional coldness, but also a sort of cold objectiveness, like the ability to be objective and not be emotionally invested in something in some instances, or to focus on the more intellectual or philosophical arguments instead of the ones that come more from an emotional standpoint or from the heart or what have you.
BR: Yeah, I think that dissociative quality, again, that Saturnian ability to say, “No, this thing is not that thing; this thing stands in opposition to another thing,” can lead to, “This body is part of me, but it is not all of me.” The body is not the same as the self. And if you’re quite grounded in that I think it can lead to a type of scientific experimental-type of approach to observing the body. That made me think about—and I wish I could remember the name of this person. There was a TED Talk of a scientist, a woman who had a stroke, and she’s like a neuroscientist. And so, as she’s having the stroke, she realizes that she’s got the perfect opportunity to get firsthand data about what happens when you experience a stroke, and her TED Talk is about that experience and then recovering from the stroke and then relaying that, parlaying that into research.
Even for me, one of my #astrologergood experiences right now is this nerve injury that has me occasionally experiencing things like being in water as though a full-grown human were sitting on my arm, and I know that that’s not accurate. And so, that quality of, “Oh, yes, the data the body is sending is just data,” and not personalizing it or taking it too seriously I think is that cold and dry. And if I understand correctly dryness brings separation. And so, I think we see that separation from the body in those qualities.
CB: For sure.
AF: Yeah, and that sense of a fixed, cold, dry air sign being something that has really strong ideals about the collective and what could be, but not necessarily a sense of human connection or attachment to the realities of working our way there. And I think that’s where a lot of the notions of the sign of perfectionism or extremely high expectations can come from as well because there is this strong, fixed, cold idea of where we all can be, and it’s connected to possibility, which is something that is beyond earthiness, beyond Capricorn, beyond the reality of what is. We’re seeing the possibility of what could be, but then the fixity around that is when it can be cold and dehumanizing and disconnected.
CB: Yeah. Austin, my friend, Austin, always likes to joke about this one time we were at a conference, and as a joke, he uses as an example of my Aquarius Moon and rising how a friend of ours got sick with a cold or something at the beginning of this conference. She was in really bad shape and so I had to drive her to the emergency room at one point. And then we’re sitting there in the waiting room of the doctor, and she’s like really sick, and I was reading Vettius Valens at the time, a translation of Valens. And there’s a Stoic passage about Stoicism and intellectually accepting the things that you have to go through, so that you’re not thrown off by them and you can accept everything because it’s just a perception of your mind and all this other stuff, and Austin always laughs and talks about how I tried to share that passage with them. I was like, “Here, read this, it might be helpful for you at the time,” when in reality what she needed was like a hug or something like that. But me, I’m trying to share something intellectual to help her get through this, theoretically, from that more detached emotional standpoint or what have you. It could be helpful, but it’s kind of missing out on some elements I think that are important for humans.
AF: Yeah, if you bring an Aquarius to the hospital, they will explain to you why your experience makes sense in the larger context of time-space reality, but they won’t even think to give you a hug necessarily.
CB: Right. Or explain how really this is all just like a simulation potentially. So you’re not really feeling pain right now, it’s just that your brain is being told that you’re feeling pain. So if you just change your perception of things then everything will be different.
BR: Yes, yes. I can give you data to help you inform your decision about how to respond to this event, or I could help you conduct an experiment so you can gain more information based on this unfortunate occurrence. And maybe if you’ve learned from prior experience you’ll also insert a, “Would you like a hug? Is there something supportive that I should do?”
CB: Right. So there’s a certain robotic quality I think we’re getting at that sometimes gets associated with Aquarius, which is really funny; and that actually is relevant—we should circle around to robots and AI and machines and other things like that at some point. But one of the things that comes up that’s been interesting in the two episodes before this one—just as a theme on the podcast this month—has been science and skepticism and the role of science in society, as well as the scientific method, and this attempt to determine facts about nature and about reality that are objective, partially due to the belief that our senses, that human senses, are fundamentally flawed in terms of our ability to accurately see things for what they are.
So humans have developed this method of trying to get past that, get past the flaws in our senses, and instead look at things through statistics and averages, or by creating really controlled, sometimes sterile laboratory-type conditions for testing things, so that you can attempt to determine what’s true and what’s not true. There’s something very scientific about that. On the one hand, it’s attempting to achieve something intellectually, and has; obviously, modern science has made so many advancements and discoveries over the past few centuries. But then sometimes it can also be associated with this cold, detached quality, which can sometimes be good in terms of objectivity, but other times be bad in terms of perhaps that’s not all there is to life; perhaps there’s other elements that are sort of outside of science, or outside of at least the scientific method.
AF: Yeah, I think that relates to this idea of over-objectivity that can be one of the challenges of the sign. Aquarius is also about understanding. So wherever Aquarius is in everyone’s chart is like where they seek to gain understanding of something or have a really broad scope of knowledge around something; it’s a knowledge-and-understanding-oriented sign. And so, the pursuit of a more objective framework for science is a very Aquarian pursuit and I think a worthy one at that, but likely suffers if we try to actually remove human experience altogether from the framework. We’re not really able to see anything if not through our own perspective; there has to be some element of understanding that we are subjective creatures. And I think this is one of the challenges for Aquarius is the desire to go beyond all subjectivity or beyond all human experience into something that ideally has a more perfect objective framework to it. But that can of course have its own shortcomings.
CB: Yeah.
BR: Yeah, I keep thinking Saturn put both the rational and the materialism in rational materialism, and it’s Capricorn that brings the material, and it’s the Aquarius that’s like, “Okay, but make it rational.” And even science over the last couple hundred years—depending on which particular experiments or movements or hypotheses you’re thinking about—has given us ample data to suggest that we just don’t have the sensory equipment to have a truly objective data set. We can’t interface fully objectively with reality. But thinking of what you said at the beginning of this episode, Aerin, thinking about Capricorn through Pisces as a whole, in Aquarius, we potentially go overboard fixating on making things as objective as possible, doing so in a way that really does dehumanize it.
Like the idea that we could put a monk in an MRI and through enough different experiments we could somehow scientifically figure out, “Oh, well, that’s really the few synapses that make meditation,” as if there isn’t something more human happening. And I think that kind of points us towards that shift, the correction that Pisces represents that there is something more than just what you can think, like Descartes. Yes, if you’re thinking, you definitely are. That’s maybe necessary, but it is not sufficient. Maybe it’s the other way around. But it’s definitely an incomplete perspective of what it means to be if we’re just focusing on what we can think and what we can rationally understand or control in time and space or limit in time and space.
CB: Yeah, that makes me think of—going back to what you were saying, Bear—in terms of narratives and the passing on of stories and myths and of shared wisdom from the past, that gets passed on collectively, or becomes a collective part of our understanding in different cultures or in cultures in general. Science to a certain extent is that as well because it’s a body of research that’s compiled by a number of different people over a period of time that represents oftentimes things like consensus. That might be a good Aquarius keyword, like an attempt for a group to find consensus. But another keyword that comes to mind for Aquarius that’s kind of interesting, that I just thought of, is ‘a library’ ‘cause a library is a repository of information in books.
And if you take it back to the very beginning, before there were books, there was just speech, and that’s kind of like a Gemini thing, which is just somebody who’s just talking or talking between two people. And then eventually you get to Libra and you start to get more about the social implications of speech and what’s appropriate or what’s not appropriate to say, or what’s polite vs. what’s vulgar in a social context. But then eventually you get to Aquarius and you’re talking about speech and trying to capture it by writing it down and putting in words in the written form in a book. And so, Saturn in the context is concretizing something in the same way that it did to a certain extent in Capricorn and making it fixed in Aquarius by trying to make speech permanent and then attempting to build up large repositories of that that represent the collective wisdom or words or speech of large groups of people that’s then passed down in generations.
BR: Yes, there’s so many different responses to that. Just on the surface, yes, library. Oh, yeah, Aquarius is airy like the cloud. The cloud is the internet library of all information. That one’s pretty surface level, but thinking about the Gemini to Libra to Aquarius, my very, very mixed ancestry and my great-great-grandmother on my purely matrilineal side were indigenous, in the bush of Alaska, hunter-gather, preliterate—non-literate, whatever you want to call it—peoples. And we definitely are a group and we definitely have culture, but we’d be really hard-pressed to say that we have a society, and definitely not a civilization. And so, I’ve been wondering about the difference between culture, like Capricorn, and civilization and society, state structures and Aquarius.
And something about that process that you described, the speech in Gemini, all peoples have some kind of speech or communication, and maybe the Libra symbols are that kind of transition between speech and writing. And my people and other Alaskan native peoples had storytelling knives and would draw stories in the dirt but then erase it. And so, there’s this kind of ephemeral quality there with the symbolic artistic quality of Libra. But then Saturn does come and bring writing, and the earliest writing was in either clay or stone before we invented the technology to have paper, various types of paper. And I know techne, technology itself is another good Aquarius word that we can think about, thinking about the way that written literacy/textuality is in some ways maybe a prerequisite for civilization; that technology of being able to make speech and symbols endure over a long period of time, kind of bringing together Saturn and maybe even a little bit of Mercury’s triplicity in there; Jupiter too.
CB: Yeah. And I think it gets back to something I’ve been thinking about with AI recently, which is that all technology is trying to just enhance something that humans already do, or it’s trying to make it easier to do that. So this, for example, we’re using Zoom right now to talk over the internet, and it’s just enhancing our ability to do something that we already could have done in person, by sitting down in person. It’s making something possible or easier to do instead of all of us flying from different parts of North America to get together to talk in person; we’re able to do this from home. But it’s fundamentally still just recreating or still doing something that we already would have done or could have done prior to that time.
AF: Yeah, I think all of the air signs have these different representations or ways of communicating. Gemini might be how we communicate one-to-one directly to another person. Libra might be how we communicate to the group; so the ways that laws or social conventions and social norms are communicated. But Aquarius, there’s this sense of how do we communicate amongst all of humanity en masse, like on this really, really vast collective level? And I often think that various forms of technology are trying to mimic or imitate things like telepathic communication that sort of remove the need for us to be sitting down in a room together in order to communicate. It’s like the next best thing or some kind of tool or mechanism that allows us to communicate on that larger level.
CB: Yeah, ‘cause air is an element that allows things to be transmitted from one place to another. And I think that’s the big thing about air. It represents a transitional stage where things are passed through air. And that can be like communication. In other instances it can be, unfortunately, like viruses or other things like that that can pass through the air and affect things, even though they’re otherwise imperceptible, but it’s just like the passage of one thing to another.
BR: Something about what you said, Chris, about technology made me think about the way that almost all technology is just replicating or attempting to improve something that we already do. And most of our favorite inventions as humans have tended to be ones that change our time-based relationship to that thing. Like the washing machine. We still have to wash, we still have to fold, but washing and drying just got so much faster. Even thinking about things like how different types of modes of transportation made the world so much smaller because it made it take so much less time to get from one place to another.
So that kind of contraction-making, making the world smaller means that you can travel further and faster, which means that your relationship with time gets funky and holographic, and it isn’t super linear. Which is interesting ‘cause coming into this episode I would have said, well, Capricorn is nocturnal or feminine time; it’s cyclical. It’s the way that you look at a picture of your grandparents and you see your face in their face. But after hearing Aerin, I’m not like, no, I agree. I think that Capricorn has the linear time and Aquarius has the ‘everything is everything’, which means it’s a ‘nothing-type of time’ and the technology lets us do that.
AF: I love that. It’s like the two Saturn signs as different ways of efficiently using time, and Capricorn will efficiently structure it’s time in a linear way, reducing any divergence, or anything that unnecessary, any frill or fluff. But then Aquarius is like, “Well, the most efficient use of time is just to teleport somewhere, so that I don’t actually have to take the time to physically get myself there.” So I think that that’s where a lot of the more innovative notions of the sign come from, like inefficient use of time and space, which treats time as a simultaneous experience. Like everything is all at once. What’s that beautiful movie? I’m gonna mess up the name of it. Everything Everywhere All at Once. Do you know what I’m talking about?
CB: Yeah.
AF: What’s the name of it, Chris?
CB: Yeah, it’s Everything Everywhere All at Once, I think, right?
AF: Yeah, yeah, I think so. It’s such an exquisite Aquarian movie that I highly recommend to anyone who’s trying to understand the sign. Like just watch the movie. It’s like, okay, we’re like interdimensional, shapeshifters that are going realm to realm simultaneously to rebalance the greater experience of humanity and all beings everywhere; so that’s a good way to explain it.
CB: Yeah, for sure. I like this time or this temporal component. I think that’s a really good point. I think we’re getting onto something really important here with both Capricorn and Aquarius as Saturn-ruled signs, and Saturn being the primary planet traditionally associated with time. And I like this notion that Capricorn would be all about doing work more efficiently. Because time is all we have, time is ultimately the most important currency ‘ cause each of us has a finite amount of time at our disposal. So ultimately one of the things it comes down to anytime you’re doing work for somebody is you’re giving up a small slice of your time, which ultimately means you’re giving up a small slice of your life that you’re giving to somebody.
So you’re really giving them your time and time is the most precious thing, which sometimes we don’t think about, especially when you’re young. But the older you get, the more and more you realize how important time is and how valuable it is. And especially towards the end of a person’s life, they start thinking back and even get a greater sense of that. Because it’s only once you really have a lack of something or you start to realize the scarcity of something that it becomes more important. So Capricorn would definitely want to focus on doing things more efficiently and finding ways that you could cut down time just by being more conservative or conserving your energy or you’re conserving your time in different ways; one of our keywords in the last episode for Capricorn was ‘conservation’. But Aquarius I think would be more like, “Or you could just invent this thing that will help you do this twice as fast or twice as efficiently.” So it’s using a piece of technology to leverage things in order to give yourself more time, or in order to take less time to do something.
BR: Even if the Aquarius ends up spending an inordinate amount of time, multiple factors more time inventing the thing than if they just did the workaround or chose a different task instead. And I wonder if part of that is that ‘fixedness’ around making that perfect future that could be here now manifest. Like even if I don’t benefit from it, at least then it comes into being and then it can be done the right way. Maybe there’s something like that.
CB: Yeah, totally. And the love of technology or the ‘mad scientist’ archetype is kind of like an Aquarius archetype I think of sometimes.
AF: Yeah, and that sense of also just wanting to skip the process altogether, which is an efficient use of time, but then doesn’t often actually work in the experience of it. We still need the use of time and space in order to arrive at things. And I think Aquarius would prefer to just kind of pick ourselves up and place us on the horizon line of where we’re going rather than actually having the journey or the process of getting there. So in the long run, it can be less efficient with time but in the interest of creating tools and modalities that help us use time in the most efficient way.
BR: Something about concretizing the ideology with respect to time, concretizing the efficiency being the imperative there or something.
AF: Oh, my God, yeah. That reminds me of one of my favorite Aquarian images that I’ve ever heard of from someone in an early astrology class that I was taking many years ago. We were learning about Aquarius, and they were like, “So is Aquarius like a concrete block floating in the sky?” It just seemed like the most perfect description. You said ‘concretizing’ and it really made me think of that because it can be so fixed or rigid in its own ideas or ways of doing something. But then there’s this notion that it’s floating in the sky, like it’s also ungrounded from the Earth and from reality.
BR: Totally, totally. I just wrote a piece about Aquarius. It’s like the ‘icy cloud palace of the silent sentry’ or something like that; you know, Saturn’s very quiet. Or ‘sentry at the edge of the solar system’, something about the iciness. I know you’re Toronto-based. I don’t know if it gets quite cold enough to have icy hotels where you are, but I spent some time in Fairbanks. And having been inside a space that literally the walls are made of ice, like, yes, that is what Aquarius is like; ice palace, but also concrete.
AF: Oh, that’s amazing. Yeah, an ice palace. Or Superman’s crystal Fortress of Solitude.
BR: Yes.
AF: I’m betraying my nerdiness right now. The crystal Fortress of Solitude is so Aquarian to me. It’s like this place of aloneness in another realm that Superman flies to and gets recharged by his healing crystals. Like I can’t believe that was in a comic book, it’s amazing.
BR: Yeah. And then when he’s Clark Kent in his Fortress of Solitude—I don’t know if he can be Clark Kent—no, that’s when he’s on the other side. Something in my head just tried to burst forth about the opposition between Aquarius and Leo, and Superman when he’s out there being seen by everybody as like the heroic Leo, the heroic individual that everyone’s holding up there, but then behind the scenes it’s actually the ice palace.
AF: No, that still makes sense. ‘Cause when he’s Clark Kent, he’s participating in the world and he belongs, and there’s that sense of a Leo connection in his Clark Kent identity as Superman; he’s like beyond human.
BR: Archetypal identity vs. lowercase person identity or something like that.
AF: Mm-hmm. And it makes me think of the notions of projection that are associated with the sign as well. Most superheroes are these characters that we project something onto, our desire or need for someone to be more perfect or beyond regular, colloquial human experience. And I think that Aquarius is able to project something different, which is part of where the ‘innovative-ness’ of the sign comes from, but also it’s a sign that can struggle with projection when we are not able to allow others or ourselves to be human. And that’s where things can be held to these really, really extreme, almost inhuman ideals or expectations.
BR: Yeah, that’s where you get the Aquarius who loves people, but not persons.
AF: Yes.
BR: That trope. But yeah, the idea of a person is great. The idea of people is fantastic, but then when you get into the nitty-gritty, particularly if Aquarius is stuck in that really rigid ideological perspective, “Well, this way is totally right,” if you judge every single person by your own perspective then it can become really easy to see things in people that aren’t really there.
CB: Or like developing a philosophy that’s supposed to be applicable to large groups of people, but then when it comes to one-on-one relating and running into an issue there.
BR: Yeah, like on paper the idea of Kant’s categorical imperative that you should be able to have a rule that you would do all the time and apply it to everybody would be great, but in practice you could come up with just a very long list of all the ways in which any of those rules can fall apart in certain circumstances or contexts. Which makes me think about what you said, Chris, about the temporal qualities of Saturn. Saturn is the planet that deals in time. The only currency Saturn accepts is time. And so, you can learn a lot about Saturn and you think a lot about Saturnian things and you can have Saturnian experiences, but only through time can you actually learn Saturn’s language or start to get an understanding of what time is.
Kind of like the way that when you’re young and you ask, “What is love? How do I know if I’m in love?” and all the adults are like, “Oh, trust me, you will know. You won’t be confused if it happens.” Time is kind of like that too and maybe that’s part of what happens with the Saturn return and getting past that opening sextile after the Saturn return. You start to get enough perspective of what time is in and of itself and then you get that Capricorn orientation towards trying to save as much of it as possible because it is so precious. Or the Aquarian urgency and progressiveness that comes from seeing that the future is almost now, it is always imminent, and also that it extends many generations, seven generations or more. And so, the things we do now get force-multiplied when we extend their impact into the future. I hope that makes sense.
CB: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because it brings up something I think that’s really relevant here that we talked about briefly in the last episode. And I think I first learned this from my first history of astrology teacher, Nicholas Campion, where he did a lot of work on historical cycles and how they were viewed by astrologers through history, especially things like that Age of Aquarius, which I guess is relevant here. And he said that humans are always either idealizing the past, like idealizing some distant, remote period in the past, which now that I think about it is more of a Capricornian thing as a nocturnal sign. A looking-back quality with Capricorn, or almost a more conservative quality of like, “Things were great back in the day. If only we could get back there to that period where I grew up.” You have this idealized version of the past, even though things were never as great in the past as they sometimes seemed.
But then the other part of that is that humans sometimes have this quality of idealizing the future, which is another temporal component, another temporal perspective that’s not focused on the here and not, but instead it’s focusing on how great things are gonna be in the future. How technology’s gonna fix everything and diseases and hardships and all these other things will be so much easier at some remote point in the future. Astrologers, for example, sometimes will think at some point astrology will be proved and everybody will just accept astrology, and then we’ll live in this utopia where people grow up learning astrology and everything’s great. And they don’t really focus on any potential downsides that might happen in the future, or the fact that with the passage of time some things get better and some things get worse, but life still at its core sometimes is very similar. So I think that there might be something going on here that might be another interesting contrast between Capricorn vs. Aquarius: the idealization of the past may be more with Capricorn vs. the idealization of the future more with Aquarius.
AF: Yeah, I think that’s so true. And there’s this idea that the future can always be better than the present moment. We have no control over history, and we have maybe some control over the present moment, but I think part of the idealization of the future that happens with Aquarius is that sense of projection that the future can be better or more perfect or more complete in some way than what’s happening right now. And that is perhaps also where some of the perfectionism/procrastination aspects of the sign can come in because if things are not ready to be perfect yet, or things are not ready to become this idealized state then maybe we’ll wait till later to actually get to them.
CB: Yeah, or that we can work towards that, that we can actually control, as if we’re like time travelers. By doing things in the present, we can control and manipulate the future and make it better if we simply focus and work towards something, whether it’s a technology that’ll change everything for our descendants in the future, or whether it’s an ideology. I’m looking through some of my files right now and there’s a real forward-thinking component to a lot of the people that are coming up, especially some of the Mercury in Aquarius people.
For example, Steve Jobs had Virgo rising and Mercury stationary direct, coming off a retrograde, in Aquarius, in the 6th whole sign house. And he had a very forward-thinking mindset in terms of technology, and he was the founder of Apple Computers and was able to see this period initially where everybody would have a personal computer. And he saw that in the future back in the 1970s or 1980s, but then also helped to create that, helped to create the reality where nowadays everybody has a computer. He could see where things were headed with music and with mobile MP3 players and so he created the iPod, and then all of sudden tons of people have an iPod, and it completely transforms things like the music industry and helps to shift people from buying CDs in record stores to everybody buying MP3s online through the iTunes store or other things like that. Or even the iPhone and his company being the first to create a real smartphone and ushering in that whole transformation. So that forward-thinking component to technology can sometimes be a major factor, I think.
Let’s see, other people like that. I mean, I know Alois Treindl is a really good example of an astrologer like that who was the founder of Astrodienst or astro.com. He has Taurus rising, with Venus, Jupiter, and Mercury up in Aquarius in the 10th whole sign house. And again, he was one of the first people to create a website to start doing computerized reports for astrology and to create a website where you could go and get your birth chart calculated for free in the 1990s. And that was just a game-changer in terms of transforming the astrological community by making it easier for astrologers to get access to reliable and accurate chart calculations, and just different things like that in terms of being forward-thinking in terms of technology, and doing things which at the time are out of the ordinary by doing something that not everybody else is doing, and sometimes going against the grain or doing something that makes you stand out by being innovative; but then eventually those innovations, once they get adopted, they become commonplace.
So sometimes in retrospect it’s hard to see how these forward-thinkers were actually kind of different or weird initially in their time because eventually their uniqueness gets sort of subsumed by the culture eventually when it’s seen to be useful or there’s something advantageous about it, and it becomes eventually commonplace. So there’s this almost cyclical process between Leo and Aquarius and what is the norm vs. what is outside of that, but then what is outside of that oftentimes rotating into the center of things and becoming the norm after a long enough period of time.
BR: Absolutely.
AF: I feel like that’s a combination of the detriment of the sign to the Sun, and then the fixity of the sign is that something may be seeded or may start in detriment to the larger accepted norm, but then the fixity of the sign allows it to have the persistence to see something through until it’s actually been seeded in the larger collective. And it makes me think about how Aquarius season also contains Imbolc, which is the midway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. And Imbolc is this time of seeding something, where the seeds that had been planted through the winter start to quicken or start to become conceived or moved towards the life that’s gonna burst forth when we get to the spring equinox and it’s Aries season. And so, there’s this idea of maybe seeding or planting something that is controversial or outside or innovative, but then being able to stick with it and be persistent until that seed becomes more accepted or more widespread.
BR: Yeah, I think particularly in business, to be on the cutting edge or just ahead of it you have to be outside of the norm. If everybody’s doing it, you’re not finding something innovative and new and futuristic in that space. So it makes sense that Steve Jobs and folks like that would be operating so far afield while they’re doing the long Saturnian work of creating the thing. But if they’ve done their job correctly then the technology saves you so much time or makes it so that you feel you’re getting that much more value out of your time then everyone’s gonna adopt that of course. Because that is the one that everybody does share in common is recognizing, “My time will come to an end, I don’t know how much of it I have. I want to enjoy as much of it as possible.”
But then in terms of the social norm qualities I was thinking about my own experience with queer activism. Looking back now, actually 20 years or more even, thinking back to when we were, as young queer activists, adopting words like ‘queer’ and then having our elders be like, “Why are you using this word? That’s a horrible word. Bad things happened when people said that word in your presence. Why would you people do this? You young children, you should listen to your elders.” Now, thinking back from the perspective of my 13-14-15-year-old self, well, the word ‘queer’ seems to be pretty well-normalized. And so, at one point folks were standing outside of the norm saying, “Hey, we’re outside the norm. We’re not inside the group and all of us would like in, please.” And then eventually once everybody gets in then you redraw the parameters of who’s in, who’s out, what’s the norm. And so, I think of the Leo side being the shining forth of the social norm, but it really being Aquarius that’s defining and holding the structure of that norm itself, if that makes sense, like the social institutions.
CB: Maybe part of the Saturn component is Saturn both has those rings, but also Saturn is the furthest visible planet. So maybe part of the archetype is exploring what the boundaries are and what the boundaries on the outer limits of society are and pushing those boundaries, and finding out that those boundaries can be pushed a little further than people thought up to that point.
BR: Mm-hmm.
AF: Oh, I love that. Yeah, Saturn as a Capricorn ruler being about physical boundary and limitation of material, Earth-based resources, and then Saturn as Aquarius’ ruler being about social boundary and being at the edge of that or the outskirts of the social norm of the social boundary. And I do think that Aquarius has a propensity to be more invested in pushing at the boundaries of different hetero-normative experiences or ways of people relating to one another, ways of relating to our own bodies, and that’s where some of the progressiveness of it can come from as well.
CB: Yeah, that’s a really good point. And just pushing against that which is normative in general might be part of the archetype for Aquarius as a major recurring phenomenon.
BR: Yeah.
AF: Even like—yeah, go ahead, Bear.
BR: I was gonna say I think a lot about Saturn as holding these two different perspectives, the Capricorn/Aquarius. Capricorn’s so close to looking back into the past, but Aquarius is like, “We’re halfway through, we’ve got to look forward towards the future.” But Saturn has the ‘here’s the foundation, here’s the wall set in stone’, but also the qualities of breaking. Anytime I think about, “Oh, broken bone, what’s Saturn doing?” partly ‘cause of the bones, but also because of the breaking. Whether it’s making the bond as permanent as possible or breaking the bond forever and ever, that’s a Saturn thing. And so, it feels like that shows up both with the way we’re connected to social institutions or reify, and also the way that we build them or try to direct them for the sake of the future.
AF: I love that. Yeah, Saturn as breaking in its different forms in these signs. That makes me think about the different correlation to family that Capricorn and Aquarius both have as well. Capricorn family is about legacy. It is about our physical bones and our DNA. DNA is quite literally a ladder, which is like my favorite image for Capricorn. But Aquarius is about chosen family, I think, and about the ways that we sometimes break from the tradition or the legacy of DNA, bone-oriented family to have some kind of other or outside or non-normative experience of family and sense of belonging and connection.
BR: Yes, yes, yes. That made me think about different ways of using the word ‘ancestor’, and I’ve thought about Saturn related to ancestry and ancestors for a really long time. And one of those things I was thinking is in Capricorn it’s like “I am my ancestors’ wildest prayers manifest. Here I am. Their bones are now my bones.” And then in Aquarius, we’re like “Holy cow. I’m somebody’s future ancestor. I’m a future somebody’s ancestor right now.” It’s about what it look like to be a good future ancestor in this very moment, each moment.
AF: Oh, yeah, so true, and the various forms that we become future ancestors, whether that’s through actual children and legacy and created family, or whether it’s the transition from Aquarius to Pisces, like at some point my body will be the ancestor of the ocean when I am dead, and my body returns to the Earth and becomes the ancestor of some kind of organic matter that is turned into something else.
BR: Or the way Vettius Valens is the ancestor of a lot of people who are present now or listening to this podcast in the future.
AF: Yes, ‘astrology daddy’.
BR: Yes.
CB: Valens himself, I believe, had some Aquarius stuff. He has Sun and at least tropically Mercury in Aquarius actually.
AF: Oh, wow, that makes so much sense.
CB: Yeah. And you mentioned non-normative or pushing against things that are normative, and it makes me think of one of my favorite comedians. In 1962, there was this huge pileup of planets in Aquarius and it was kind of notable at the time; some people were saying it was gonna be like the end of the world. There was a mini fiasco surrounding that of not-great predictions being made by not necessarily astrologers. But anyway, one of the people that was born under that huge Aquarius stellium in February of 1962 was Eddie Izzard. She has Virgo rising with Mercury in Aquarius, as well as Mars, Saturn, South Node, Sun, Jupiter, and Venus all in Aquarius in the 6th whole sign house. And I just think about her first major special that was huge in 1999, Dressed to Kill. One of the things that was focusing on was transgressing transgender norms, which for the time, for like 1999, was really edgy back then. And nowadays, while it’s not so many years later, understanding it at the time for what it was, I think it really stands out.
BR: Yeah, yeah. I first came out in my multi-part coming out process in 2000. And so, as a young queer person Dressed to Kill was one of the few things that was out there in real media—not some niche thing that you see in the gay and lesbian history society—that even touched on talking about gender in any kind of transgressive way, or queerness in a broader way even. And it touches on some stuff that I don’t that we can really dwell upon in this episode, but Dr. Ali Olomi has talked a bit about the flattening of the gender nuances related to Saturn specifically in the Arabic that happened in the Latin translation process. And so, Ali’s got some very interesting thoughts on Saturn and even thinking about Mercury as the planet that is common or the planet that is neither masculine nor feminine. I often call Mercury the ‘non-binary’ planet.
And so, seeing both Mercury and Saturn there together holding different types of important roles in that chart, and also the Saturn placement in the 6th, there’s a few different things there that I see as being like, “Oh, yes, the Aquarius and the Mercury and the Saturn all coming together in a way that really makes sense.” But that was just so groundbreaking and radical, and I can imagine from the perspective of somebody who was maybe not yet born in 1999 or the early 2000’s that if they were to watch Dressed to Kill, they might just cringe-fest through the whole thing and see it as being antiquated or backwards in some way, but that’s only from this backwards-looking perspective.
CB: Yeah.
AF: Yeah, and then context of when it was shared, it was groundbreaking. And also, there’s that sense that the 6th house can be a place of activism as well because it’s a service that is given to others. And so, this expression of queerness as a kind of activism or something that is shared or something that is in service to I think really speaks to the chart.
CB: Yeah, and was very forward-thinking in that sense. And I keep looking through my different Aquarius placement charts. Another one that came up was Karl Marx who had Aquarius rising and then the ruler Saturn in the 2nd house of money and finances, and having very forward-thinking, sort of idealistic or utopian ideas about the future and about money and commerce and things like that, that they then tried to put forward as a manifesto that ended up influencing a number of people.
BR: Yeah, Karl Marx is a really interesting one. I always think about the ‘a spectre is haunting Europe’. Oh, yeah, Saturn and Pluto in the 2nd house. You would look at money and capital and be like, “Ghost haunting. Definitely ghost haunting afoot.” I know in the year ahead forecast y’all talked about the Moon and Saturn moving into Pisces and that kind of concretizing of it’s not quite the same technological, progressive social ideas of Aquarius. It’s more of the Jupiterian qualities of Pisces, the spiritual leanings. I think Aquarius itself would be more concerned with—and Karl Marx is a good example of this—breaking down the ‘how does it happen’ and ‘what is actually happening in the process of capitalism’, but then rooting into the Piscean, more spiritual transcendent, for lack of a better word, kind of impulse rather than focusing on ‘the most efficient use of time in the future would be to do X, Y, Z’. I think if you’ve got Saturn in Aquarius, it might have looked more like that.
AF: Yeah, I think it’s a great example as well because we can see how the concept of socialism is something that is ‘for the people’ and is about equity and having space for everyone and for the whole collective in the sense of equality between individuals. But then in practice socialism can actually become dehumanizing in different ways because it doesn’t account for the uniqueness of individuals. And I think this is one of the things that Aquarius has to navigate, this fixed idea that is meant to be for the people or for the collective. But if it becomes too fixed, or if it has the rigidity that Saturn takes on sometimes, there’s a way in which we are striving to create monocultures rather than actually allowing and embracing the uniqueness of individuals.
So I often think about the dichotomy between the rigid, fixed idea of something that creates monoculture or ecosystem diversity. In an ecosystem, everything has its specific place and purpose, but all of those things are completely different from one another, and if we remove the algae from a pond, it’s going to affect the whole rest of that ecosystem. And so, I think there’s a sense in which ecosystems are maybe a better fixity or a better idea than something that creates sameness, and that’s maybe where socialism has shortcomings as well.
CB: Yeah, there’s a similar issue we sort of mentioned in passing, Stoicism, which is one of those philosophies that sounds really good on paper and you can take a lot of really great things from, but it may not necessarily be appropriate for everybody, this idea that you adopt a philosophy that everything is predetermined and that even if you can’t control all of your external circumstances, what you can control is your mindset, and you should constantly practice to be detached from things to a certain extent to neither rejoice excessively in the case of good things in your life, nor become super depressed in the case of bad things, but instead try to maintain an equilibrium at all times.
There are some things about that that are very idealistic and sound good and you can take good things from, but ultimately may be hard for everybody to implement or may not even be appropriate for everybody to try to implement. It may be detrimental to some people if it goes contrary to the way that they could best live their life in a way that’s authentic to them. So maybe that’s a recurring theme about the idealism of a perfect intellectual philosophy or way of life, but maybe the attempt to want everybody to adapt to the same thing or to have an idea forced on everybody and sometimes coming up short.
BR: It makes me think about some of the parallels between Stoicism and Buddhism. This one part of Marcus Aurelius that kind of stuck out to me is where he’s talking about his kids and being like, “Yeah, they could die. You should be able to look at that and not be so overwhelmed by the reality that your kid could be dead tomorrow,” and I was like, “Damn, dude.” It’s a very intense application of recognizing that. ‘Everything is impermanent’ I think would be the Buddhist way of saying the same thing, at least as I understand based on my own practice and experience. And so, thinking about that, even the Dalai Lama made some comment—speaking at Stanford—and he was talking about equanimity, and he said, “Yes, backstage they had a cheese platter, and I ate it. And then I realized that I really would have preferred chocolate cake. That’s not a particularly great example of equanimity. I should be an example of the perfect type of equanimity where I would be equally happy with dog poop or chocolate cake or cheese—makes no difference.” Obviously, I’m paraphrasing.
So thinking about a couple of different ways, whether it’s that sort of thing like, “Oh, well, your sensations are just sensations. And you’re not your body anyway, so your excruciating nerve pain, you should just tough it out. Not a big deal, ignore it,” you could disassociate away. Or even thinking about things like time. “Well, let’s look forward seven generations.” But there’s a lot of research that suggests that the human psyche isn’t really capable of thinking that far ahead. Or like we were talking about certain types of scientific experiments or certain fields of science, we know scientifically that we don’t have the bandwidth, whether in our visual sensory equipment or our hearing sensory equipment to even perceive all of the sound or see all of light. And so, there’s this kind of wanting to be able to act as though we have a full and complete perfect perception of everything even though we clearly don’t. Or wanting to act in a way—Chris, I think earlier you said something about almost being like a time traveler—that we influence the future, but we also know that we can barely even think far enough in the future to do that even if it were possible. And I think Saturn doesn’t resolve the paradox. It’s over there in Pisces that we do that work, I think.
AF: It’s really the notion of nonattachment, which is both an Aquarian blessing and a curse. I mean, it makes me think about the story you were telling earlier, Bear, about the neuroscientist who was having a stroke and then monitoring the actual neurological responses happening during the stroke and having this non-attached, curious experience about what’s happening rather than necessarily being immersed in the experience itself, which is more of a Piscean theme; to be fully immersed in something and not separated from it.
BR: Yeah, I’m remembering a little bit more of what she talked about, and it was like one side of her brain in particular was shut down for some time or was impacted. And in the TED Talk, she recounts basically that process taking away part of what one would typically ascribe as regular human consciousness. And so, kind of being removed from the rational, linear, language-bound part of being a person, but as a scientist being aware that that was happening; and so being struck with, “Oh, this is me and my animal body. This is what my animal body normally would be experiencing.” So I think there’s something there about understanding that on the edge of what Aquarius can contain rationally is something that is entirely other than ourselves, but also part of us. It puts us into that detriment of the Sun opposite Leo, but also all of Saturn stuff being opposite the lights in general. It stays dark to us, but we know it’s there. Just like death. We can’t ever really talk about it, but we’re often always talking about it.
AF: That makes me think of so many things, one of them being this sense that Aquarius is somehow beyond our animal nature. I think it’s where human beings feel that we are different or other from other kinds of animals or other kinds of life forms or being somehow beyond it. And it also makes me think about spiders and spiderwebs, which I’ve been thinking about a lot in relationship to Aquarius lately and reading about how spiders actually have consciousness in their webs, and that they project thought and memory into the physical webs that they create. And this feels like a very Aquarian concept to me, and what you were saying really made me think of that because there’s a sense of projecting our consciousness into other or beyond our physical body, but something that is also interconnected with space around us as well.
BR: That’s so interesting. What immediately came to mind was my grandmother telling me an indigenous peoples’ story, and of course I can’t remember who she was even saying—maybe she didn’t even say; she just said ‘Native people’. My Native grandmother, Native people, believe that Grandmother Spider—her web spins stories. And I know that there are some different groups on the African continent who have a similar type of view looking at Anansi and just thinking, “Oh, the spiderweb is the physical container of memory.”
That’s what stories are—an airy transmission of emotional memory. Unless we have a feeling attached to an event we are very unlikely to remember it. So that’s interesting. It feels like a pulling together of some things or maybe pointing to the metaphor of Aquarius as ‘the water-bearer’. Aquarius isn’t the water that’s being borne. Aquarius is the thing that allows one to carry the water and then dispense it; water being the emotions there. The spiderweb is a physical vessel for transmitting stories and the emotion that’s contained in them.
AF: I love that. Or like we might be the individual spiders at the center of the web, but we are connected to and creators of something that is much more vast and much more broad than that, that also contains our stories and our memories. And I love the image of story and memory being something that extends into physical space around us, like beyond our individual selves and cells. It actually makes me think about atoms and how the electrons are physically so far apart from the nucleus of the atom. And I always wondered about that as a younger person in science class. Like how does that work? Is that telling us that there is actual energy or something that we’re connected to that extends beyond the space of the nucleus or the center of that thing?
BR: Yeah, as a kid, I imagined that spiders would climb down a tree and across to another tree, and then back up the tree, dragging their web behind them; that’s clearly not what’s happening. Apparently they use the wind to carry their little tiny bodies from one place to another—or at least the big orb weavers and stuff—and that’s how they’re able to make these really epic webs. Yeah, there’s something in there about that physical manifestation that creates 3D connection that itself is dew-catching. That’s kind of a weird image, but I’m thinking about looking at spiderweb; it’s almost not there and it exists suspended in the air. And what does it do? It catches dew, d-e-w, dew, wet moisture, right?
And Aquarius is a damp sign, or a dew-producing sign I think I read in one of the ancient texts as well. And so, if Aquarius has Saturn as a ruler, that’s a dry, cold planet, and so we wouldn’t think of it being particularly concerned with emotions or connectivity. But it’s just material enough, just capable enough of collecting moisture that it ends up having the temperamental wetness and moisture as I understand it—meaning things that can collect—and that’s what makes the water signs relational and emotional, if I understand correctly.
AF: Wow, that’s so beautiful. It’s like the first beginning of something condensing into form that leads us back into Pisces. Having this network that is created from wind, which is literally a thing of the air, that allows us to condense something enough into form that then we are led into more watery spaces or into more physical experiences.
BR: Yeah, something about the whole hydrological cycle. If we just think about oceans or rivers or rain then it’s easy to forget that air is part of it and the condensation, that whole thing. And even just thinking about the different elements, air being upward-moving and rising rapidly, which is in contrast to water and earth, which are downward-trending. Yeah, it’s like the water moves up into the air. But that condensation process, I know there’s some connection between Aquarius and rain as the ‘rain-bearing’ sign. I think it’s part of the tradition where we get the water-bearing signification, the imagery.
CB: Yeah, we should actually mention that. So Aquarius is traditionally called ‘the water-bearer’, which means the water-carrier, and the traditional symbols associated with it are a person that’s holding a vase that’s full of water and there’s water pouring out of it. And sometimes people confuse that and they think that Aquarius is a water sign, but it’s actually an air sign, even though it’s called ‘the water-bearer’ and it has to do with that concept of carrying the water or transporting or transmitting something that’s valuable, which is water, but not necessarily being water itself.
AF: Yeah, and like Bear was saying it was associated with a time when Aquarius was rising at this time of the year, and it was signaled to bring the rainy season. And so, it was like this bearing of water but not being of the water itself. And I think also Saturn is connected to water trades as well, which feels very much like a water-bearer kind of experience; like trades that take place because there is water and in proximity to the water but are not of the water themselves. It’s more about the transmission of resources and materials through water.
BR: I’ve been dwelling on that point with Saturn a lot with my clients recently and kind of saying, “Okay, well, it’s interesting. Saturn’s associated with things like irrigation canals and also with minerals under the Earth before Pluto came and co-opted that job.” And they say, “Well, that’s water. Saturn—that’s already strange. Minerals? What do these have in common?” Those are things you would need if you were gonna be wealthy. If you don’t have irrigation canals in a desert place that’s agrarian-based then you don’t have food, you don’t have sovereignty, you don’t have a legacy to hand down, you don’t have anything. And so, I think there’s a very, very interesting connection with Aquarius specifically as the ability to harness, the ability to contain all of those things that Capricorn is concerned with conserving.
AF: Yeah, and that sense of wealth or abundance being something that can come through our proximity to water or through our proximity to Capricorn-type resources like mineral and rich soil and all of these things. It makes me think of some of the distortions of indigenous communities that have happened in Canada. We have the Great Lakes here. And so, there is this inherent access to fresh water, and then on a lot of the rivers and on the coasts these accesses to different waterways that were originally home to indigenous communities and then co-opted by settlers once they arrived and realized the inherent value of being in proximity to water, or the wealth that could be accessed through the proximity to water.
BR: Yeah, absolutely.
CB: That reminds me of how a lot of major civilizations around the world developed in places where they had proximity to a major river or to water. Egypt, Mesopotamia, in China, in India, the Indus Valley civilization, and all over the world.
BR: All along the Mekong, my people were named after the river that we’re near, even though we weren’t even fixed, permanent settlement-dwelling people. And I think even today something like 80% of the world’s population lives very adjacent to either the ocean or a major riverway. It’s like one of the core fundamental parts of human civilization. And even thinking about the shipping trade, irrigation canals, they are things that take a very long amount of time to complete, and they would require having spent a lot of time listening to your elders about the value of spending this much time noticing weather phenomena so that you actually can successfully plan a sea voyage. So there’s like a lot of different Saturn things that show up there if we keep digging even a little bit deeper.
CB: Yeah, that’s gonna be one of our most core things maybe for this episode, just the idea of major human civilizations happening and expanding around water or near water. And so, the deeper reasons for that, not just as a source of sustenance with water, but also as a means of transporting things and moving things. And even today, even though we have airplanes and stuff, the majority of international trade of goods happens through huge ships that literally transport stuff from one continent to another.
BR: It makes me realize for the first time that both the Saturn signs are more concerned with water than they seem at first. Capricorn, ‘the sea-goat’, and then Aquarius, the air sign that is busy pouring out water.
CB: Yeah, good point.
AF: Yeah, it’s funny ‘cause in terms of personality expression Saturnian signs might resist watery expression or watery nature, but then make very good use of it at the same time. It’s like, “I don’t want to be of that, but I want to use that in the most efficient way possible.”
CB: That’s great. I love that. All right, I think that’s a good point for a break. Let’s take a brief break.
BR: Okay.
AF: Perfect.
CB: Cool. All right.
[break]
CB: All right, we’re back from a break. Why don’t we transition at this point into talking about some example charts. I did a search through some of my files just for people with Aquarian placements. One of the classic ones that’s often mentioned of a Mercury in Aquarius is Martin Luther King, Jr., who had potentially Taurus rising. He was said to be born around noon, which if that’s correct puts Mercury at 11° of Aquarius in his 10th whole sign house. And we were talking earlier about that forward-looking or forward-thinking component, and people often cite his “I Have a Dream” speech as one of the most significant speeches in American history, and that might be a good example, again, of that forward-thinking component. He wasn’t talking about what things are right now, but instead he was talking about this idealized state in the future he hoped that we would get to some day, even if he himself would never see that.
BR: Yeah. Yeah, it’s interesting too, the “I Have a Dream” speech coming after the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” and I think about that Aquarius nature showing up. Something that Valens actually says Aquarius is ‘betraying reputation and the truth’. Thinking about “Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. King very astutely and succinctly calls out some of the what-aboutism—which is one way that people call it—of the resistance to progress that comes in the form of, “It’s not quite the right time. Oh, that’s too fast. Maybe we should do it this other way.”
And so, particularly thinking about his image, I think we had also looked at his large relative to the US chart and saw some interesting things. But thinking about the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and the “I Have a Dream Speech” both being examples of him looking forward to that place of potential utopian, perfect progress being achieved and looking and saying, “Yes, I still have the optimism. I’m still committed to the dream. And also, here are all of the current present impediments to that dream coming into being.”
CB: Yeah.
AF: Yeah, and also both the letter as well the public speaking being mercurial experiences up there in the 10th house like that. The publishing of the letter or the sense of public speaking to a larger collective dream feel really apt as well.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Let’s see, other Aquarius placements I’ve got in my files: Robert Zoller, who was an early pioneer of traditional astrology, and he was really one of the first astrologers in the late 20th century. He published a book on the Arabic parts or the lots in 1980 called The Lost Key to Prediction: The Arabic Parts in Astrology, or something like that. He had Pisces rising with the Sun, Mercury, and Mars in Aquarius in the 12th house, as well as the traditional ruler of the Ascendant, Jupiter, in Scorpio in the 9th whole sign house. Interestingly, he had a vision of the future and the future of astrology that involved looking back into the past, and he was one of the first people that really championed that idea that we should go back and translate and recover a lot of these old sources from ancient astrology, saying they were still useful and relevant. I mean, he would say “the old ways are the good ways,” and there’s a certain way in which that can be a good thing or a positive thing; there’s another way in which that can lead to a sort of fundamentalism, which can be not as good if somebody’s like only the old ways are the good ways. But it’s interesting how you have that dynamic sometimes of past and future and them getting mixed up or intertwined in different ways. Yeah, so that’s one of my other Aquarius examples.
BR: It’s a really interesting one too, with his chart having that mutual exchange of domicile and triplicity, especially thinking about Saturn as the triplicity lord of the sect light there, and that back-and-forth just really hammering down. Like a lot of younger astrologers who didn’t have the chance to interact directly with Project Hindsight, ‘the Robs’ are very much like Superman, these solar figures that archetypally represent that movement. There’s something about that Sun-Saturn opposition being so tight and going back and forth and really holding down that ancestral figurehead kind of role, if that makes sense.
CB: Yeah. Well, now that I think about it, Saturn was actually going through Aquarius during that timeframe of the founding of Project Hindsight and their initial flurry of activity, where they were all talking about their main idea to excite the astrological community was that the future of astrology involved looking back into the past.
AF: Oh, yeah. And that opposition and mutual reception between the Sun and Saturn, like you were saying, Bear, it’s like we need to respect the tradition, but also in a way that is progressing our tradition forward or allowing us to look to the future of the tradition in that kind of supportive exchange between Saturn and the Sun.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right, other people. This one’s kind of a goofy one, but Jim Carey has an Aquarius stellium with potentially Scorpio rising. Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury, and the South Node in Aquarius. And I think that’s another one where right around the time his career really took off was around the time of Saturn in Aquarius or pretty close to it, I believe, give or take. And this is funny ‘cause he had a kind of wacky, kind of zany comedy style that was really unique and kind of odd at the time in the early-to-mid-‘90s. I was reading this thing recently about one of his co-stars, Tommy Lee Jones. And Tommy Lee Jones was more of a strict traditional actor and he really did not jive with Jim Carey’s style at all and told him once, “I do not condone your buffoonery,” or something like that. And it’s really funny thinking about that in that context. It’s a little hard ‘cause Jim Carey’s become less prominent as an actor or a comedian. But it’s, again, one of those things where if you were around at the time and you realized how he stood out by being kind of odd or kind of weird in a sense, or going against the grain, it sort of makes sense, even though later those things which were odd at the time became sort of commonplace.
BR: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if did anything prominent prior to his role on In Living Color. Probably many people in your audience may not know about In Living Color. It was basically like MADtv or SNL, a recurring skit comedy show—and the Wayons family were a huge percentage of the various cast members—but a predominantly, almost exclusively black cast. And so, Jim Carey was like ‘the white guy’, the odd white guy out. And so, he had this role that was literally being the odd one out, and I think that was his first really big, prominent screen-time work.
AF: That’s such a great point. Yeah, and also this notion that clowns are Saturnian characters, and being called a buffoon is a very Aquarian kind of experience somehow. It’s like the ‘othering’ of clowns even. And The Truman Show feels like a very Aquarian movie to me because it’s similar to what we were talking about with The Matrix. It has this sense of altered reality or something that tries to go outside our subjective experience of reality into some kind of larger, more big-picture understanding of it.
BR: And even Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has that too with the memory story, time qualities in particular.
AF: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Another Aquarian stellium I’ve used as an example chart a lot—that Leisa Schaim originally showed me—was Judy Blume. She has Libra rising with Venus, the Sun, Jupiter, and Mercury in Aquarius, all in the 5th whole sign house. She had two children and she wanted to write children’s stories for them while they were growing up, so she did, and later she ended up publishing them. And eventually she ended up becoming a prolific, award-winning children’s book author who has written just a ton of books and eventually influenced a lot of children as a result of that through her writings.
AF: Wow, that’s so perfect, both, the 5th house, as well as the presence of Jupiter there as the ruler of children conjunct Mercury, writing about children.
CB: Right.
BR: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, that’s pretty good. And then, let’s see, one last one that I think is just a contrast with Judy Blume—‘cause it’s almost a similar setup, but a different manifestation and obviously not the exact same one—but I saw Alice Sparkly Kat use this chart example of Thomas Beatie who has Libra rising and the Sun and Venus and Mercury and Jupiter in the 5th whole sign house. And on Wikipedia the description is “Assigned female at birth, Beatie came out as trans man in early 1997. Beatie had gender reassignment surgery in March 2002 and became known as the “pregnant man” after he became pregnant through artificial insemination in 2007. Beatie chose to be pregnant because his wife Nancy was infertile, doing so with donated sperm.” So I think that’s kind of interesting also because of the technological component there when it comes to conceiving and having a child and everything else and things that were very advanced for the time; again, that theme of forward-thinking in some sense.
AF: And then Jupiter’s presence in the 5th there with that stellium as well. Part of the progress revolves around children and having children as well.
CB: Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so those are some of my examples. The only other one that I had was Richard Tarnas who was born with Gemini rising and Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and the degree of the Midheaven all in the 9th whole sign house. And he was, or is, a college professor who wrote a book about the history and development of Western thought that was published in the early ‘90s that became wildly successful and was assigned as a college textbook in many college courses.
But it turned out that that was just a sort of footnote or a precursor to a more important book that he was working on about astrology that he ended up publishing in, I think, 2004-2005 called Cosmos and Psyche, in which he made the case for astrology and demonstrated working throughout history and also correlating with some major developments in thought and culture and other things like that through mundane and natal astrology. So there’s this kind of forward-thinking, but also unique or kind of odd from the perspective of the established academic or scientific community that he was part of, but doing something that would set him apart as an innovation or a forward-thinking type of thing.
AF: Yeah, I love that. And then Mercury, the chart ruler, in the 9th as part of the stellium and writing about astrology.
CB: Yeah, writing and publishing, and also just the immense amount of research and background, learning and understanding that sort of goes into that, and being able to talk about different philosophers and different thinkers down through history and everything else. Yeah, so those are some of my examples. Do either of you have any examples that you wanted to share?
BR: I’m still pretty stoked about Guy Fieri’s chart. If folks aren’t familiar with him—let’s see, I shared the link to that.
CB: What’s the data?
BR: January 22, 1968, 8:40 AM, Columbus, Ohio. And that’s AA data. So happy birthday, Guy, if you’re into astrology. I saw this in a response to your tweet yesterday about, “What do you think of when you think of Aquarius?” And I immediately was like, “Yes, this is just such a great Aquarius example.”
CB: Is this the correct chart?
BR: Yes, that looks correct.
CB: Okay, so for the audio listeners, it’s Aquarius rising with Mercury and the Sun in Aquarius.
BR: And just thinking about his chart and his work with Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives kind of just being a good example of several different Aquarius qualities, and the idea that Aquarius is really concerned with the underdog, being, one, you can see in his choice of restaurants. So Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives, or Triple D, is a show where he famously said, “Take me to ‘Flavortown’,” and that’s why he’s the mayor of ‘Flavortown’. But he goes into these restaurants that are underdog restaurants. They’re not nice, fancy, Michelin-starred, Zagat-rated places. As someone who’s worked in the restaurant industry, I know that even though we all clown on him a little bit and make jokes at his expense, he’s kind of famous for not caring, understanding that what he does by featuring these small local restaurants is tremendous service. Actually when I was in AmeriCorps I worked with some kids, and one of their parents had a restaurant that was featured on that show, and their business was steady and stable in a way that most restaurants really never get to experience.
And so, it’s easy to look at what he’s doing as just being this clownish character who’s talking about food. But he’s actually really deliberately utilizing that clown role character that he plays to do good work. And he isn’t making a big show of it being work, he’s just letting the work speak for itself and utilizing what at the time was a relatively new way or new approach of potentially doing that. Food Network wasn’t really showing shows like that at the time. And even back then Food Network was freshly expanding into being on regular cable and more easily accessible for folks to encounter.
AF: That’s so perfect, that sense of using his clown nature. But also, all of those placements in the 1st house, he, himself, is personally going to the fringes or going to the outskirts of these more accepted spaces within food culture, and his personal journey becomes the edge or becomes the progress that’s happening there.
BR: Yeah, yeah. And even the whole point of the show is to find these hidden gems and the best food, these little, tucked away, secrets. Secrets are another good Saturn signification that isn’t often talked about. A secret Saturn signification. And so, you kind of put those things together, it’s just a really fun example. And I think it also really highlights that ability to just move in and out of every different type of group. That show travels all over the country, lots of different types of regional cuisine. And you can see that his genuine curiosity—his mercurial translation interpreter—that quality just lets him enter into almost any type of space. Yeah, I just think that’s a really fun example, and a really good lighthearted example, since some Aquarius examples can go towards more of the dark side of Saturn.
CB: Yeah. Well, also, he was just not the common food chef kind of host up to that point on a show like that; usually it would be a different character. And there was something about his uniqueness and the way that he stood out, which set him apart from other food hosts basically on television at that point.
BR: Mm-hmm.
AF: He’s no Nigella.
CB: Right. I was looking for Venus in Aquarius examples and a couple of artists came up. One of them is Yoko Ono, which I forgot about, who has Libra rising and Venus in Aquarius conjunct Saturn in Aquarius along with the Sun in the 5th whole sign house. And she’s famously an artist, but does very avant-garde art that some people find off-putting or kind of edgy. How would you describe that? Can you describe that better than I can?
AF: Yeah, I mean, I love that. The chart ruler in the 5th conjunct Saturn is like creating depressing art sometimes.
CB: Right.
AF: It is highly innovative and also makes me think about what Bear was saying earlier, that Saturn breaks things. And as much as people appreciated or hated her art, people also thought of her as the woman who broke up the Beatles. There was the sense that she was like a breaking force in something. But that was also an inherently creative act for her, something that fueled a lot of her own creative works, so I think that really fits.
BR: I don’t know if this band has anything to do with Aquarius, but the song lyric popped into my head about, “My old flame broke the 12-bar blues just to prove he could.” That’s what popped into my head when you asked about that avant-garde quality, Chris. I think that Saturnian quality of breaking the artistic norms, breaking the mold of what defines a certain type of art as being that type of art. Putting a urinal in the middle of an empty room, that’s art if you say that it’s art. Aerin, earlier you talked about the nihilistic, pessimistic possibilities with Saturn. I think the other side of that is absurdism. If you’re not crying at the void that you just stared into or the abyss that you just stared in the face of then maybe you’re laughing in the face of the abyss.
AF: Yeah.
BR: So I think of avant-garde art, absurdity, breaking social norms, breaking artistic norms.
CB: And rejecting sometimes the premise of what it means to be an artist and saying, “You guys say that this is what an artist is, or this is what you have to do, but, to me, this is art,” and rejecting that concept and then going a different route; going your own way.
BR: Yeah, I—go ahead.
AF: No, go ahead.
BR: I was gonna say I would have to research this to see if it tracks, but I’m just thinking about the early ‘60s and how closely that does coincide or doesn’t coincide with the British Invasion and was previously looked at as our R&B or country & western, depending on the race of the artist, and it suddenly became rock-n-roll and this whole new thing was birthed. I wonder if there’s a correlation there in terms of breaking the color barrier back then both with respect to culture and art showing up during that really big Aquarius stellium in the early ‘60s.
CB: I mean, I know Chuck Berry, for example, had Jupiter in Aquarius, which is kind of interesting in terms of music and rock-n-roll in particular, but I’m sure there’s a lot of other musicians we could look into. Another artist that somebody mentioned on Twitter today when I put a poll out was Jackson Pollock. Although I don’t have a birth time, he had the Sun in Aquarius—yeah, Sun in Aquarius—and his painting style was really avant-garde and different for the time; just taking different paints or different splashes of paint that you splash or let drip onto a canvas. Wikipedia says that, “[He] was an American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was widely noticed for his “drip technique” of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a horizontal surface, enabling him to view and paint his canvases from all angles.” Yeah, just these really abstract paintings that initially were way different than anything anybody else was doing traditionally but then became wildly popular.
AF: Yeah, in that sense of experiencing art through the avant-garde, which I think is there for most Aquarian musicians and artists. Mozart comes to mind, as well as Etta James. I think they expressed their Aquarian natures in very different ways, but both had this way of using art as a very progressive boundary-pushing kind of expression.
CB: Yeah, I just googled ‘avant-garde’ for the sake of the definition, and I really like this definition. It says, “In the arts and in literature, the term avant-garde identifies a genre of art, an experimental work of art, and the experimental artist who created the [artwork], which usually is aesthetically innovative, [while] initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic Establishment of the time.” That’s really interesting and brings us right back to some core things that we’ve been talking about when it comes to Aquarius.
BR: Yeah, that quality of breaking the mold, breaking the social norms, rejecting the art house institutions. I wish I had an art history background ‘cause I think there are some notable examples of full artistic movements that were very self-consciously rejecting—in France, it’ll come to me when we’re done recording I’m sure—the entire structure and social institution related to art in their time period. And then I think avant-garde, etymologically, ends up being about literally leading the advancement or leading a group and that quality of it being rejection. Something I’ve been thinking about is some of the mythology related to Kronos—Saturn is Kronos—in the Hellenistic tradition; it all kind of ties into that.
CB: Yeah.
AF: Yeah.
CB: Well, it really comes under that phrase ‘being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic Establishment of the time.’ So there’s ideas of ideology, of collective social norms of what is thought to be permissible or not permissible, as well as a temporal component and sometimes that being an Aquarius thing, being out of time; being the person who is not in step with their time because they are almost living in the future. Or they’re living in some age that they can see and experience, but they’re kind of weird or abnormal in their own time, in the present, because they’re already living in some anticipated time in the future.
AF: Yeah, and I feel like those are some of the themes that get maybe misinterpreted or sometimes just interpreted as Uranian themes, like through the modern interpretation of Uranus as the ruler of Aquarius. But I do think about, like you just mentioned, Bear, the mythology of Kronos, and I think that’s where a lot of those themes come from. Because when Kronos was born, he was banished to Tartarus, which is a place outside of regular Earth experience. It’s beyond warmth and light. And so, there is this sense of being ‘othered’ or banished or sent away from the hearth or the place of warmth and light that most people might want to grow up with, and then having the identity form in this place of ‘othering’ or in this place of banishment.
CB: Yeah, for sure.
BR: Mm-hmm.
CB: Did you have something, Bear?
BR: I was just thinking about Jackson Pollock being one of the artists that is often pointed to as ‘that’s not art, that’s just throwing paint on a canvas’. That is a timeless—I don’t know quite how to say it. Saturn is both time and timelessness, like the quality of standing outside of something being the only way that you can even identify that there is an ‘in’ and an ‘out’. If you’re a fish in water, you don’t know that there’s air in water. You have to be neither in the water, nor in the air to be able to look and see their relationship, and that’s what Saturn’s doing. But that being on the outside facilitating this process—there’s something about the Saturnian being not part of your time or rejecting the social norms of what has come before makes me think about even little fashion trends. I think people often associate Leo as being fearlessly themselves. And I’m like it’s probably because Leo co-opted the fashion of some Aquarius person who really didn’t quite care, and then they were inspired by their utter lack of caring, and so they adopted that uniform as theirs, “I stand apart too. I’m not part of the crowd ‘cause I’m confident.” With Leo, it’s a performance, but with Aquarius, it’s actually the real deal, if that makes sense.
AF: Oh, my gosh, so much. It makes me think about how so many trends—like you were saying—by the time they appear in the mainstream have usually come a far way and a long distance in time from some queer community or some racialized community that was the original expression of that. But then with Leo we get visibility, and Aquarius is not necessarily a sign that’s about visibility. And so, there’s something that might be seeded, or it brings me back to this idea of seeding something in Aquarius that on the other side of the zodiac becomes visible or becomes accepted or becomes more of a dominant norm.
BR: Yeah, rock-n-roll was super rebellious when it happened. There was like a whole movement amongst the elders to try to suppress that at all costs. And now we look at rock-n-roll—and when I say ‘rock-n-roll’ I’m talking about specifically the ‘50s and ‘60s and those artists. Today, if you talk about any of the artists who were known as famous rock-n-roll bands in the ‘60s, there would be nothing even remotely radical or countercultural or standing in opposition. You’re like, “That is the norm. They’re the ones that invented the norm. What are you talking about?” It’s like that process coming full circle. People seeding a whole new movement, hiding in their garage, rebelling against their parents and what came before them, and then eventually their rebellion becomes the thing that becomes rebelled against, which is the whole Uranus to Kronos to Zeus story.
AF: Yes. So much, yes.
CB: Yeah, I’m just looking through charts for other musicians.
BR: David Bowie.
AF: David Bowie, yeah.
BR: Can’t believe we haven’t talked about ‘the Starman’, or Garth Brooks in the totally opposite direction.
CB: Here is David Bowie’s chart. It looks like a rounded 9:00 AM time, but it’s supposed to be Aquarius rising. Is that correct?
BR: Yeah, I believe so. That was the thing that folks were talking, his ‘Aquarius-risingness’.
CB: So Aquarius rising, Venus somewhere around the Midheaven in Sagittarius, and Saturn, the Moon, and Pluto all conjunct in Leo in the 7th house. So for somebody a hundred years from now who doesn’t know who David Bowie is, how would you explain this example?
BR: Since Saturn rules the chart—him being that Saturn in Leo—so him being a personification of an identity that stands opposed to mainstream identity, but also having sovereignty with respect to the process of concretizing identity or making identity. David Bowie—yes, he’s famous for being a musician, but I think more so than anything he’s famous for completely reinventing his persona, his look, his sound time and time again and being very self-conscious about doing that intentionally.
AF: Yeah, and I really think the Ascendant speaks to that identity aspect, that it was about him personally. And so, much of his identity was beyond—at the time, in the context in which he was sharing his music—beyond gender norms, beyond sexual identity norms. And so, his being or his identity was in some way progressive, but then the way that he was able to share it through his chart ruler allowed connection or allowed visibility around that too.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. Let’s see—I was just looking for other musicians.
AF: Sam Cooke was an Aquarius too. And I think his music feels very Aquarian to me, singing about freedom and connection. Bear, earlier you were talking about where rock-n-roll came from. It’s not what it is now. I feel like Sam Cooke had the energy of rock-n-roll.
CB: If this is correct, Gemini rising, Sun in Aquarius.
AF: Mm-hmm.
CB: And for those that aren’t familiar, explain this example. Or who were they?
AF: Yeah, Sam Cooke was a fairly progressive musician for his time, but he was really singing about freedom, liberation, human connection, love. It was a very heart-centered message behind his music, but yeah, it kind of had like a rock-n-roll ethos to it, I think, in the early stages.
BR: He also died a bit young, which is a bit rock-n-roll. But one of the things I know him for musically and hear other musicians talking about is how his voice sounds like the voice of someone who’s lived a lot longer than he actually has. And Mercury ruling the chart, and the Saturn-Mercury co-presence there in Capricorn, feels like he felt both old-timey and classic, even though he was doing something that wasn’t classic. Listening to him, you would assume that that’s the sound of somebody whose heart got broken 20 years ago and they lived to have a bunch of wisdom, but that’s not true.
AF: And that sense that Saturnian people are just old, even when they’re like two-years-old. They have this eldership to them from the beginning.
BR: And timelessness also. Garth Brooks has A-rated birth data.
CB: Yeah, he was one of the other people besides Eddie Izzard that was born on that Aquarius stellium in ‘62, right?
BR: Yeah, yeah, the ‘62 stellium. I was just thinking about how he was the first country star to do the arena rock-n-roll show. Prior to that country musicians were more trying to do Grand Ole Opry, not Madison Square Garden, and definitely not Madison Square Garden the way that the Rolling Stones might have done it. Or you see some footage of early ‘90s Garth Brooks and it looks like you could swap out the band and the sound and it wouldn’t look that different from a Guns N’ Roses show or something.
CB: Yeah.
BR: And so, that was a breaking of the establishment norms in terms of Nashville, Grand Ole Opry country institutions.
CB: He has Gemini rising with Saturn, Mars, Mercury, South Node, Sun, Jupiter, Venus, and the degree of the Midheaven all in Aquarius in the 9th whole sign house. Nice.
AF: Wow.
CB: Go ahead.
AF: Oh, I was just gonna say that’s a very Aquarian chart. But also, the 9th house can be institutional as well. And so, his breaking of the institution makes sense with that stellium being in the 9th.
BR: And then he went and remade it by signing an exclusive with Walmart, so now his music is really hard to get unless you engage the institution. But I think it was kind of economically groundbreaking from an ‘artist financial bank account’ perspective, maybe not in other ways necessarily. So it’s interesting to see that you choose a path, you commit to it—a quality of Aquarius—and make a permanent decision. He signed a lifetime deal. So even if he later regretted having that exclusive, it’s a lifetime exclusive.
AF: Or that sense that Aquarians break institutions, but then just form their own institutions in the process, so it becomes very cyclical.
BR: Yeah.
CB: That reminds me of another Aquarius stellium I’ve used—a musician—as an example, which is Dr. Dre who has Gemini rising and the Sun and Mercury, Venus, and the degree of the Midheaven in 9th whole sign house, with the Moon in Libra. And him being in the early stages of hip-hop and being one of the earlier popularizers of hip-hop and rap, but then later also being present for other developments, ironically he was behind the highest-selling hip-hop artist/rapper, Eminem, discovering him in the late ‘90s and then producing his records and giving him a boost, so that he became the highest-selling musician in the past 20 years, both in the 2000s and the 2010s. And Eminem, we don’t have a birth time for him, but he has the Moon in Aquarius and a Libra stellium, with the Sun and Uranus, Mars, and Pluto there. So what’s funny about that is that Eminem and Dr. Dre have the classic Sun-Moon synastry, which is like the classic thing that’s supposed to be good for relationships or for couples. Those two have it and ended up becoming a team that found major success as a result of their partnership.
AF: And they both have real outlier stories as well, which makes sense, but they found connection or synastry through their outlier story.
CB: Yeah, and other outlier stuff that at first was edgy in terms of their art. Dr. Dre doing hip-hop and doing rap, which then eventually became mainstream, and then Eminem being like a white rapper and that being odd or weird at first, but then that becoming more mainstream. Both have that similar story that we keep coming back to over and over again for Aquarius.
BR: And Dr. Dre’s work with NWA—they were innovative in that time and context in terms of the history of hip-hop and NWA being one of the early groups kind of known for putting West Coast sound on the map, and musically-speaking, turning to jazz and funk in a way that wasn’t really typical of East Coast rap back then. And I don’t know if this is true, but I think it is the case that Dre picking up Eminem is what put Detroit on the map as a region of hip-hop. Prior to that it was East Coast-West Coast and then you had Dirty South coming in. But it wasn’t until Eminem that you got Detroit and Midwestern folks popping on the map.
CB: Right. And then also the funny thing about Dre is that he was primarily a producer. So he’s producing using technology to find different beats and different things like that and then would be producing all these major albums and other things like that because he was really good from a technical standpoint. And then that carried through later into the 2010s in terms of his interest in technology and ability to see future trends technologically. He created or co-founded the company that created the headphones that became wildly popular in the 2010s and then eventually was able to sell that to Apple or something for like a billion dollars, which made him one of the richest musicians at that point in time in terms of finances for like a year or two or something like that.
BR: Yeah, yeah. I think he had like the highest net worth of the musicians and he might have been among the very few, if not the first black man to have net worth over a billion dollars. It was consequential not just in terms of music and hip-hop but on a larger scale as well.
CB: Right. Yeah, so that is all interesting. What about you, Aerin? Do you have any examples that really come to mind of Aquarius placements that have stuck with you?
AF: Yeah, I mean, I was thinking about David Lynch and Laura Dern as both being Sun in Aquarius people. And I think that David Lynch really just creates his own worlds in his work and they can be quite dark. It has that feeling of Saturnian ‘otherness’ or almost like ‘other realm-y’, fringe-type realities that he’s creating. And he works a lot with Laura Dern. I haven’t looked at the synastry between their charts, but there must be something going on there because she’s been in a lot of Lynch’s films, and she’s sort of like the ‘queen’ of weird horror. And when I think about Laura Dern, I picture this face that she’s able to make a lot that conveys so much information; it conveys horror and amazement. Oh, that’s interesting—so she’s an Aquarius, but she’s got this amazing stellium in Pisces, which makes sense with her malleability of expression as well. But I think that their presentation of otherworldly-type realities and experiences feels very Aquarian to me.
BR: Yeah, David Lynch films I think of as absurd and ‘time-bend-y’. Even after watching Mulholland Drive how many times I couldn’t tell you what’s actually happening, I just know it’s really out there and that I can’t tell you how that story goes.
AF: That’s so true. It has this sense of time being not constricted to any kind of linear pathway, which is very Aquarian. It’s outside of time, but then you have these mergings or bendings of shifting between realms of time. And Twin Peaks was a lot like that too.
BR: And also that quality that we talked about in terms of breaking the norm of what even is a movie, what does it mean to tell a story. Can you make the argument that Mulholland Drive had a beginning, middle, and end? I don’t know, but it was a movie. The movie started and stopped, so in that sense it did.
AF: Progressive storytelling. ‘Cause you’re like, “What’s happening here?” And then later, thinking back on it, like, “Wait, was that dream that I had or was that a David Lynch film that I watched?” as if the two kind of merged with each.
CB: So ‘nonlinear’—that could be a good keyword for Aquarius.
AF: Definitely, yeah.
BR: Yeah.
AF: Nonlinear-simultaneous.
BR: Yeah, it’s like so much of that both/and. It’s simultaneous and nonlinear, and everywhere and nowhere. Going back to that triad that you opened us up with, Aerin, thinking of Capricorn, Aquarius, and then Pisces, Aquarius is aware that there’s this paradox, but seems perfectly like, “Well, if there’s this paradox then neither of these things is really what it seems. And so, the truth doesn’t mean anything, so why bother to resolve it. I’ll just laugh at it or do nothing with it or make a whole ideology out of it. And then I’ll leave Pisces to figure out how to put everything inside the circle and make sense of it.”
AF: That’s so true. It reminds me of one of my favorite Aquarius images, which is a bridge; it’s something that is structured, but also suspended above and beyond something. And what you were saying, Bear, reminded me of that ‘cause there are these points of contact, or these points of touching down into something more grounded on either side, but the bridge itself is able to go beyond or transcend or kind of suspend the usual experience of traveling that space.
CB: When you were talking about nonlinear things, it made me think of nonlinear storytelling and it made me look up Quentin Tarantino who’s famous for his nonlinear storylines, and he has Venus and Saturn in Aquarius. I don’t think we have a birth time, so we don’t know what house that’s in or what his rising is. But it’s kind of interesting in terms of his most famous film, Pulp Fiction, being told in these different segments or different episodes, so it’s episodic, but the timeframe is all mixed around.
AF: That’s so perfect. What was one of his earliest films? Was it called Six Rooms or something like that? It’s a story about a hotel on New Year’s Eve, and it’s giving these segments of stories from different rooms within the hotel. And the stories are all happening simultaneously, but you get these snippets or moments of them. I’m pretty sure it’s called Six Rooms, but I could be wrong.
CB: Four Rooms.
AF: Four Rooms. Okay, there’s only four.
CB: Yeah, that was 1995. That was not long after the Saturn in Aquarius period as well, which might have been around that time period. All right, let’s take a little break ‘cause I know we need to transition into talking about the other signs. I think that was a good segment talking about the different example charts and stuff like that, but I know we’ve got to get in some comparisons before we wrap up here, and I know we can do that a little bit quickly. But maybe it would be good to at least take a break at this point and then come back and hit that pretty hard.
BR: Okay.
AF: That sounds great.
[break]
CB: All right, we’re back from a second break. Why don’t we transition at this point about talking more about the contrast between the different signs of the zodiac and Aquarius? Because sometimes it’s through comparing what other signs mean that you get a better sense of what Aquarius actually means. And one of the things—even though we’ve talked about it a lot—that I did want to contrast first was that Camille Michelle Gray helped us with some research for this episode, and she created a table comparing Leo and Aquarius that I thought was really good. So she has a Leo column and an Aquarius column.
So in the Leo column one of the keywords is ‘me’ vs. in the Aquarius column the keyword is ‘us’. In the Leo column we have ‘warm, which is summer’; in Aquarius we have ‘cool, which is winter’ (in the northern hemisphere, where the tropical zodiac was developed). Leo is presence, Aquarius is distance. Leo is ‘the cheerleader’ vs. Aquarius is ‘the misfit’. Leo is spontaneity, Aquarius is more rigid. Leo is the Sun, Aquarius is Saturn. Leo is subjective, Aquarius is objective. Leo is emotive, Aquarius is aloof. Leo is ‘to trust/forgive’, while Aquarius is ‘to question’. That’s a really interesting one actually. For Leo, sometimes, trust and, not faithfulness, but ‘fidelity’ is a keyword. It’s funny ‘cause it comes up in weird ways sometimes. Trump, for example, would always make people pledge their loyalty. That’s what it is—loyalty is very important to Leo vs. to question.
Leo is charisma vs. Aquarius can be awkward. Leo is status, while Aquarius is outcast. Leo is ‘center of attention’, whereas Aquarius is ‘groups’. Leo is ‘the showman’ vs. Aquarius is ‘the intellectual’. Leo is ‘the light’ vs. Aquarius is ‘to enlighten’. Leo is ‘to perform’, Aquarius is ‘to inform’. Leo is thinking, Aquarius is being. And Leo is ‘the king/queen’ and Aquarius is ‘the kingdom’. So those are some of the contrasts that Camille came up with that are really good. Does that spark any thoughts in either of you, or any jumping off points?
AF: Yeah, I think that’s such an amazing clear outline of the oppositional qualities between the signs. One of the main oppositional tendencies that I think about for myself is that Leo is about the heart, whereas Aquarius is about the mind. And so, it’s like a very archetypal opposition between heart and mind, and I think that says a lot about what both signs do with feeling and expression. Because Leo is about the expression of something or the sharing or generosity of something, and Aquarius is about the withholding of expression in the interest of some greater purpose that is being served. And so, there’s this heart-mind opposition between expressing or withholding, or thinking and feeling as well.
BR: Yeah, I think—go ahead.
CB: For sure. Especially ‘cause thinking is such an internalized process. Most of the time you can be thinking or feeling something but not having it as visible on the outside. And maybe sometimes Aquarius runs into issues with that and that can lead to downsides where they can come off—at least on the surface—as cold or distant or robotic, even if there’s things happening internally that aren’t visible.
BR: Yeah, I think there’s something there too about—I wonder if the ‘being’ and ‘thinking’ got flipped. Because it seems like Leo is more being.
CB: Yeah, I was a little uncertain about that.
BR: Especially given how all the rest of them were trending. But thinking about just that opposition anyhow between being and thinking, and loyalty and fidelity, and even the Sun in conjunctions and Saturn in oppositions, there’s something there about without the light being shown by the Sun, by Leo, there wouldn’t be the shadows that give us depth. And so, there’s something about the shadow, the secret that is created only through that opposition process and the Aquarius side being the side that’s maybe more aware of it or more able to step outside of it.
Leo’s so busy down on the ground being and shining and cheerleading and exuding and what not, and emoting, that it doesn’t have the Saturnian amount of time and distance and airy, dry, separating qualities necessary to step back and away and direct that sovereignty and agency towards the expression itself, which is why I think you get Leo being so fixated with loyalty—are you here; are you loyal to me—whereas I think Aquarius is more concerned with fidelity. And maybe here we could use monogamy and polyamory as stand-ins for this ‘cause I think it illustrates it a little bit more clearly. Leo’s sitting there saying, “Be loyal. Be monogamous. Just stay with me.” And Aquarius is like, “Well, if choosing me means that you’re making your life less-than, if you aren’t able to maintain fidelity with your ideology when you’re loyal to me then you’re not actually being faithful to the relationship.” I don’t think Leo sees that necessarily as much as my Leo placements would like to think we do.
CB: Yeah.
AF: I love that so much. And also, Aquarians like polyamory ‘cause they love a good group experience, so there’s that too. But yeah, what you’re saying also speaks to the need for Leo to feel seen and appreciated, and that’s part of where the loyalty and sense of connection and desire for belonging can come from. But Aquarius doesn’t need to feel seen or appreciated. It just needs to feel right or have the right concept or be insightful about something. And so, there’s a sense that Aquarius doesn’t mind being in opposition to the group or in opposition to the place of belonging because it’s more interested in having the right framework for looking at it.
CB: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And that’s really interesting, the ‘us’ vs. ‘we’ difference between those two, and the tendency to think in multiples to some extent with Aquarius or to want to spread things around.
AF: Yeah, it’s like a personal vs. collective orientation, for sure.
BR: Yeah, like Leo seeing a group as being composed of many individuals, for better or for worse, and Aquarius seeing a group as being an individual group and kind of erasing the individual members. Maybe Aquarius is like an ant colony or a beehive or a mycelial network and all of its little fungi spores and what not vs. mammals. Yeah, those are definitely a bunch of different individual bodies. I don’t know, meerkats may have a group, but they aren’t like a hive-mind the way that ants and bees are.
CB: Yeah, or the way that you have those forests where you have a singular tree in some sense that has its characteristics, which is like Leo, but then underneath that you have a whole network of all the different roots that are connecting together the different trees in the forest.
AF: Yeah, root systems and mycelial networks feel so Aquarian ‘cause they’re also invisible. There’s that sense of their unseen or etheric nature or something that exists outside of the space of light and warmth but the interconnectedness of it. We can see also that we’re one step away from Pisces where nothing is differentiated at that point. We get to the interconnectedness with Aquarius and then by the time we get to Pisces it’s all just one anyways.
CB: Yeah, let’s definitely transition to that. Oh, yeah, Bear, you mentioned polyamory, and I thought that was a really interesting example ‘cause that’s another where sometimes people run into issues. Intellectually, that makes sense, or some people have the experience of getting into a polyamorous relationship and being open to it intellectually, but then sometimes the experience of that being different. Which just makes me think of where some people can’t handle that or aren’t wired to handle that because of the more Leo component that wants that direct one-on-one connection or a feeling of fidelity. And it just makes me think again of other instances where we’ve run into that, like with Stoicism or other philosophies, where ideally this is a great system that should work for everybody. And for some people it does, or for many people it can, but then there can sometimes be outliers where it doesn’t quite apply, and that difference sometimes between theory vs. practice.
BR: Yeah, I think the Sun is sitting there being like, “Pure spirit, pure consciousness,” and Saturn’s out there like, “Okay, these are the boundaries of it. I could see this work, so these are the long-term implications.” But if we then visit the squares and we go have a chat with Taurus who’s all Venusian and relational, “But make it sensory. Make me feel it in my body.” And Mars is like, “Yeah, I’ve got feelings. They’re intense. I have lots of passions.” I could imagine Marcus Aurelius being like, “You know, we could get rid of Mars. We don’t need those passions actually.” I know he didn’t like to have to be involved in military stuff.
And I think that Aquarius is like, “Yeah, ideologically this makes sense. This tracks. There’s good logic behind it. I could endorse that.” But then Aquarius still has to talk to the Taurus physical body and be like, “Are you actually okay with your partner being with somebody else? What was it like to smell someone else on your partner? Did that arouse some violent passions in your Scorpio heart?” ‘Cause if that’s the case then it doesn’t matter if it intellectually makes sense, you would have to erase and sublimate and dissociate from your true Leo solar identity and what actually gives you physical and relational belonging and deny your real motivations if you were to just side with the ideology.
CB: Yeah, and sometimes the value or the place of selfishness. I don’t know if there’s another word for that, but sometimes the distinction or the tension between selfishness vs. whatever the opposite. What is the opposite of selfishness? Selflessness?
BR: Yeah, yeah. I’ve been thinking about self-centeredness. Even thinking about the symbol of the Sun, like, yeah, the self is the little dot. It’s the circumpunct in the middle of the circle. That’s why we have that symbol for the Sun. But I think there’s something there about self-centeredness. Maybe the opposite of that is actually self-negation. Like I’m only self or there is no self and that the secret third-rail in the middle is maybe actually selflessness, an acknowledgment that there is self, but doing less of that ‘-ness’.
CB: Yeah.
AF: Yeah, Leo is more about over-focus on the self at times, whereas Aquarius is about denial of the self. I don’t think we’ve talked much about the denial aspect of Aquarius and it bears mentioning.
BR: All of us are in denial about it.
AF: Yeah, exactly. We’re like, “Just pretend that doesn’t exist.” But even when you were describing that fixity struggle of polyamory there—which was kind of getting me laughing—it made me think about how anything ideological like that can take a certain amount of depersonalization from our experience, which if we go too far with it can be a denial of our experience or a denial of the heart. And then we get some of the Aquarian tendencies of rationalizing away feeling or holding ourselves above feeling or resisting warmth and connection because it doesn’t fit with our idea of what’s happening, and that’s some of where that heart-mind struggle can come in.
BR: Yeah, thinking about Leo as your tender, soft insides, and Saturn being like, “No, nobody’s getting in here.”
AF: Yeah, exactly. It’s very much Kronos being banished to a place away from light and warmth. Leo is the light and the warmth. It’s the home of the Sun. It’s the hearth of the zodiac in a way. And Aquarius and Saturn are like the absence of that, for better and for worse; or the sort of opposition to it.
CB: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And just to clarify, I wasn’t necessarily criticizing polyamory earlier, but just the different experiences different people have and the way that sometimes things come up in different ways.
BR: Yeah.
AF: Yeah. Someone with a lot of Aquarius placements might feel really comfy in polyamorous dynamics, and someone with a very different chart might just feel ‘uncomfy’ with it.
CB: Sure.
BR: I feel like a lot of this conversation we could be imagining placing the Sun in Aquarius and orienting from that perspective. But if we were to place the Moon in Aquarius instead, what does it mean to be nourished and fed and to feel safe and comfortable inside of distance? What does it mean when you feel more comfortable in the cold than in the hot? There’s nothing wrong with hot tubs, Scorpio, but if they make you feel queasy, you probably shouldn’t hang out in one. And so, maybe here the heat of the hot tub is like polyamory. It’s just what it is, but it’s how it actually resonates in our animal body and what emotive motion it sparks off in us. And I think Saturn has a tendency to want to deny that or to say, “Well, that motion is wrong,” or to ask, “Hmm, well, what would the abstract individual feel in this situation as a resistance to the selfishness or the self-centeredness of Leo? I reject the self-centered perspective.” So instead of acknowledging that this made me very angry or jealous or unhappy, I’m going to ask myself, “What would one feel about this scenario?”
CB: Yeah.
AF: Definitely.
CB: That makes sense. All right, why don’t we start going into some of the other signs. One of the ones I wanted to get into is the progression, but also what is the corrective function of Pisces, which is the sign that follows after Aquarius. And one of the things Camille wrote down in our notes was, “By inserting emotion and compassion into the desire for a more humane world,” and I think that really makes sense. Some of the colder or the more distant emotional connections that Aquarius is missing in intellectualizing things, you really get it in spades when you get to Pisces.
BR: Yeah, it’s almost like the difference between the perspective of the ‘ghost in the machine’, that type of perspective—or like the little alien inside the head in Men in Black. That’s another way I think about Aquarius sometimes vs. the spirit inside the machine, the soul inside the body. It gets watery. It becomes downward-trending. It sinks into us. We’re not trying to float away. We’re trying to get back into the ocean. The whole water cycle is one thing. You can’t actually separate any part of water from any of its other expressions, but for all intents and purposes it’s a lot easier to think about oceans vs. rivers vs. rain. And I think that Pisces is that correction of going like, “Yeah, yeah, we can get scientific about the water cycle, but I just want something to put in this cup.” “I just need to take a bath.” Yeah, something tactile and that ‘tactile-ness’ being the entryway into their being more feeling. Less separation, more coming together and merging, the way that the ocean collects all the water.
AF: Yeah. First of all, I’ll never not be thinking about Aquarius as the tiny alien inside the head. I’ll think about that forever and ever. This is so real. If you just need one image from this whole podcast, it’s that. But I think that’s such a beautiful way to describe it, Bear, to capture the moment when the cloud becomes condensation, or like that edge of the cloud becoming rain in the water table. And there’s the sense also that when we shift into Pisces, it is like the full expression of oneness and connection that we were trying to get to with Aquarius. And we were talking about Aquarius as forward-thinking or forward-oriented or oriented towards the future. And so, it’s kind of like we envision in Aquarius what we actually arrive in when we reach Pisces. And at the same time there’s some things that need to be corrected there as well, which is maybe like feeling the grief of our rigidity and feeling the loss that can happen through our high expectations, and also feeling the vulnerable self on the other side of those extreme expectations and rigidity. I think that when we arrive in Pisces we come into contact with all of that as well.
CB: For sure, yeah. In Aquarius, that forward-thinking component that’s thinking so much about time and has a vision of the future, the vision is largely motivated by the idea of making things easier for people often through technology or other things like that in order to save more time, or in order to improve life in that way. The motivation for Pisces instead becomes compassion and empathy as the primary motivating factor, as well as the means by which one tries to go about creating a better world for everyone.
BR: Yeah, I can almost imagine Aquarius going out and doing a really scientific set of measurements and going, “Well, see, there’s this percentage of good here, and this is the distribution. And these people are not in that space, so this is what needs to happen to correct it.” But thinking about the correction that Pisces represents made me think about something my grandparents said, what my grandmother said with respect to ideological differences. She said, “On the face of it, it seems like there are really stark differences of opinion, but when you get down to it, almost every single person is really just concerned with feeling safe enough and comfortable to enjoy time with family and to not feel like they’re being overrun and losing their freedom of choice.”
And I think it’s that kind of Jupiterian thing, or if we think about Aquarius is the social institution and the letter of the law in Saturn’s ‘exacting-ness’ and make it permanent, no take-backs, no exceptions, Jupiter’s over there like, “Well, the spirit of the law was really this. We need to take in all of the context, everybody in the community.” And so, maybe that’s the difference between retributive and restorative justice or retribution vs. repair. Jupiter comes in and says, “Let’s say ‘yes’ more. Let’s say ‘yes’ to the spirit, and let’s dwell less upon all the things that we’re in radical opposition to.” I feel like Pisces recognizes all the ways in which radical binary opposition even to bad things just reifies that existence of the bad things that we need to stand in radical opposition to. And Pisces at least maybe believes in, whether or not it’s true, by bringing in more of everything and transcending into what makes what we all share in common rather than the things that set us apart that there can be more cohesion, a better future. I think it’s still future-oriented in a different way.
AF: Yeah, I don’t think we’ve talked much about this, but the strong ideals of Aquarius can ultimately become very divisive to the point where we have a war of ideologies, or these really, really hard lines in the sand between different belief systems or perspectives on reality. And if Aquarius is about knowing and being right, each group thinks that they’re right. But what you were saying, Bear, makes me think that the reasoning behind that is to have some kind of belonging. “Well, this is my group of people that I am a part of because they understand what’s right, and they know things the way that I know things.” And then when we come to Pisces there is this deeper healing that happens through coming into Jupiter’s realm that says, “Okay, well, there is space for everyone here. There is connection.” We see more of our connection as human beings rather than our differences. Or there’s this sense that ideologies can co-exist with one another without it being so incredibly divisive.
BR: Yeah, thinking about the temperament differences there, like the cold, aloof Aquarius that’s so concerned with the ideological purity that it does become divisive, and then Pisces coming in, “Water is still more warm than ice cold air,” and so bringing in slightly more warmth, slightly more connectivity. Yeah, creating space where it’s the divisiveness itself that gets labeled as the thing that doesn’t belong.
AF: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
AF: And I think about the way that the last four signs of the zodiac are Saturn signs bookended by Jupiter signs.
CB: Yeah, totally.
AF: Like the necessity of that in so many ways; we have these extreme highs and lows that are integrated together. But also, when we start Sagittarius, the levity of Jupiter’s realm needs to be followed by the reality of Capricorn, Saturn’s realm, the hard reality when we get there. But then we still need the relief of Jupiter’s levity on the other side; we’re going through this kind of tunnel with it.
CB: Yeah.
BR: Yeah, it’s like—go ahead.
CB: There’s these real themes when you transition from Sagittarius to Capricorn of optimism vs. a fundamental pessimism, which is not always bad, ‘cause sometimes pessimism plays a very constructive role in keeping you alive. But then you run into a similar thing in terms of Aquarius still being a sign that’s drawing very much on Saturn in rejecting things and the negation of something; whereas once you get to Pisces, we’re in a much more sign of affirmation, of affirming things, of saying ‘yes’ to things, and a sort of fundamental optimism sometimes bordering on going too far in being optimistic, to being like Pollyanna or there’s another term for that. But yeah, it’s an interesting transition getting out of two Saturn signs and getting back to a Jupiter sign.
BR: Yeah, I was thinking too about the difference in triplicity and the other planets that have some sort of sway in those signs, and going from the Saturn, Mercury, Jupiter, the three triplicity lords of Aquarius. There’s that diurnal, dry, technical, externalized—I generated a different list of things for those. But I think comparing that to Pisces where it’s like, well, we’re bringing Venus and Mars and the Moon back into the show. So we still get Jupiter, and we still get that expansive ‘yes,’ ‘yes, please,’ but we’re saying ‘yes, please’ to bringing in more relationality, more passion, more of the Moon, more of the body, orienting from how things actually feel. And so, earlier we talked a little bit about the Stoics and Buddhism having a similar kind of bent in terms of looking at nonattachment being one of the responses to ‘everything is impermanent’ and there’s suffering that is entailed in life. But the other side of that is, well, compassion, compassion, compassion. And even the Om Mani Padme Hum, the mantra of compassion, it’s said to contain all of the Buddha’s teachings.
And so, I think that’s maybe a good way of encapsulating what Jupiter ruling Pisces is attempting to do in response to, yes, the world is suffering, and we could get really pessimistic, and we could get really, really focused on controlling the minutiae of our actions now in the hopes that we can control the future to make to somehow not be impermanent maybe in the future, or we could just generate as much compassion as possible for the reality that all of us really struggle with this, and then that makes everything so much simpler. Just as much as Aquarius is concerned with the truth of what gigahertz frequency is this sound being transmitted at, Pisces is just as concerned with the truth that we all are born, we all die so it seems, and we all struggle with the in-between process; all the Saturn stuff in between the Jupiter stuff.
CB: Right. One of the things that’s come up really recently in the tail-end of Saturn in Aquarius that we mentioned briefly earlier was just the emergence of artificial intelligence and some questions about that; like if you create something that’s intelligent or has signs of intelligence, but it’s not quite the same as human intelligence, and what the dividing line is or what are the differences between those things. That’s a very Aquarian-type theme. And it’ll be interesting as we transition into Saturn in Pisces, what the contrast is there and what some of those other elements are that come up that might be missing from that.
AF: Yeah, I definitely think Saturn’s ingress into Pisces is going to help us illustrate this last bridge of the zodiac ‘cause we’ll feel quite directly what it’s like.
CB: Yeah, it’ll add in some of those missing pieces. ‘Cause one of the things in the 1960s—1950s—there was this period where most of the television networks had just black-and-white television, and then when Saturn went into Pisces there was this intense two-or-three-year period where a bunch of them converted to doing color television shows or programming. So it’s like that idea of moving something that’s monochromatic to having the vibrancy of this additional dimension that helps to bring something out or make it more life-like in some way.
AF: Love that. Jupiter is so much more vivid than Saturn in some ways.
CB: Yeah.
BR: Yes, yes. Like that ‘technicolor dreamcoat’ situation. One of the things that came to mind as you were bringing up artificial intelligence—as ChatGPT and a couple of other things are seeming to pass the Turing test—is the difference between sentience and soul, but really the question of what makes a person; particularly if we’re thinking about what is science. There is a very particular type of science that is a descendant of the Enlightenment movement, but there’s also indigenous knowledge systems that are consensus that’s passed down orally for all of human history. And if we’re looking at some of those worldviews then trees are people, whales are people. There’s a lot of non-human peoples in the world. Maybe Pluto coming through Aquarius and wrapping up Saturn in Aquarius there, and also our entry into the Age of Aquarius is maybe posing the question or pressing us to answer the question and interrogate it a little bit more. It’s like, what makes a person? What’s the difference between having sentience and having a soul? Maybe Aquarius is that sentience and Jupiter and Pisces are more concerned with the soul or the spirit or whatever the difference is between those, if there is one.
CB: Yeah, I like that. All right, let’s move onto other comparisons. So that’s the opposition between Aquarius and Leo. Usually we go through the triplicities and the modalities. I know we’ve talked a bit already about the triplicity comparison of the other two earth signs, but I just wanted to check in and see if there’s any other thoughts on the connection or similarities with the other two air signs, which are Gemini, ruled by Mercury, and Libra, which is ruled by Venus. What is it that’s new, or what is it that’s different at this point? I guess with Gemini we started with a mutable air sign, then we went to Libra, which is a cardinal air sign, and then finally we went to Aquarius, which is a fixed air sign. So one of the things about Aquarius is it’s the least malleable or the most rigid of the three air signs, since air is otherwise something that’s characterized by its lack of rigidity or its ability to adapt and move and connect things and adapt to different shapes. But as a fixed sign ruled by Saturn, it seems like Aquarius is the least malleable in that way.
BR: That made me think about the notion of the doldrums. It’s like what do you get when you get stagnant air? I’m like, well, stagnant air is not very great, especially if it’s kind of damp. That’s like miasma and a whole bunch of other connotations that aren’t particularly savory or pleasant. But dwelling on what we were talking about earlier in terms of Saturn’s association with trade over waterways or wealth connected to water, if you have a boat that’s sitting on the ocean and there’s no breeze and the air’s not moving then that’s very bad and you might die.
CB: Yeah. Even the beginning of three years ago, when Saturn went into Aquarius, all of a sudden this pandemic breaks out, and we have this air-borne virus and people are having to wear masks in order to attempt to not get sick because of something that’s being passed primarily through the air.
BR: And also, the big push in response to that to update HVAC systems. Which if we’re looking at public schools or things like that, that is illuminating some of the longstanding infrastructural problems that have happened because of some of the ideological things in our state institutions. But even thinking about that stagnant air, that lack of movement with the ships I think is a really good way of sinking into the parts of Saturn in Aquarius that are challenging, like that negation. Like the desire for the perfect utopian thing, and if it’s not the perfect utopian thing then why bother, nothing matters anyway. It’s like maybe there is some quality of Aquarius having that feeling like there’s no wind in your sails, or like the air is more stagnant, that idea, so being harmed in that way.
AF: It does kind of make me think about the different forms of air and wind with each of the signs in this triplicity. And Gemini ruling the lungs—it’s quite literally personal air or our personal experience of breath. And then with Libra we have shared spaces of air or air that gets passed from one to the other or becomes relational. And Aquarius makes me think about outer space, which is a vacuum; like there’s no air in outer space. But this sense of vast vacuum feels very Aquarian to me, or even the absence of air, or that fixity of it and the collective aspect of it, as well as being just beyond the Earth, or beyond our personal or relational expressions of air.
BR: I like that. It’s like how can you have those relational qualities when Saturn’s busy saying ‘no’ to breathing?
AF: Yeah.
CB: Right.
AF: You have to breathe to exist, and Saturn’s like, “No, no, it’s fine. Don’t need it.”
BR: That silly mortal stuff.
AF: It’s a waste of time.
BR: In a perfect world this breath would last forever.
AF: Yeah, it’s a waste of time to breathe.
CB: Yeah. And then going back to the communication thing of the three air signs, Gemini is kind of like talking, just like having a conversation one-on-one with another person. Libra is similar and it takes into a social dynamic of hosting a party where you’re talking to a number of different people in a room. And then Aquarius I think of something like Wikipedia where you have a bunch of different people that are dialoguing and creating something together that’s collaborative in some way.
BR: Yeah.
AF: Yeah, that image of the library that you gave earlier, Chris. It’s collective spaces of information or conveyed information. Although, I guess, people are shushed in a library, so maybe you’re not talking there.
CB: Yeah, that’s actually interesting. I mean, things like Wikipedia bring up some issues with group dynamics, and whatever the prevailing thought is or something like that can sometimes be shut out if there’s too many people in terms of establishing what the consensus reality is. And sometimes that consensus reality can shut out other viewpoints or things like that. That’s sort of an issue with the astrology pages on Wikipedia, for example. Astrologers are outnumbered by skeptics, so the astrologers don’t really control the narrative or the astrology pages on Wikipedia, and they all largely trend towards being negative towards astrology because they’re outnumbered by the larger consensus view of those that aren’t familiar with astrology but think it’s a negative thing.
BR: It makes me think about the difference between information or words in Gemini and actual story or a conversation in Libra vs. an archetype, and I don’t think it’s the meaning. I think Pisces is what gives us meaning and that Aquarius is more about what transitions—a whole bunch of accumulated or collected stories and conversations—into a body of knowledge; a production of information, a production of knowledge is that Aquarius component of it.
CB: Yeah. And in terms of how the signs relate—let’s say Aquarius vs. Gemini—Aquarius might be impressed with Gemini’s ability to communicate and talk about a number of different things, but it might consider some of those discussions to be kind of surface level and not be very deep or not stick with any one subject for too long. Whereas Gemini might be impressed by Aquarius’ depth of knowledge or wide-ranging intellectual interests and tendencies to create overarching philosophical models for different things, but they might at the same time consider them to be too serious or too heavy all of the time and not capable of just having a light conversation; not being able to make small talk, for example.
BR: Yeah, I just hear Bart Simpson’s voice in my head, like, “Boring.”
CB: Right.
BR: Yeah, and Libra’s over there like, “You’re all words, and you’re all meaning, and nothing sounds nice. Can’t there be beauty? Make it move me, please.”
CB: Yeah, well, let’s talk about that. So then the comparison with Aquarius to Libra we bring in some social niceties with Libra and the sensitivity to reading social cues and being able to be sort of cognizant of that, that Aquarius cares a little bit less about because of its tendency to reject social norms.
AF: Yeah, I think Aquarius probably envies the ability of Libra to be understood—which is something that can be a real pain point for Aquarian placements; it’s like this feeling of being misunderstood—and the eloquence of the way that Libra placements express themselves. But Libra might envy the courage of Aquarius to go beyond something that’s going to be more readily accepted or rock the boat a little bit.
BR: It made me think about basic divisions within rhetoric between logos, ethos, and pathos: so logos, ‘the word’ or ‘logic’, ethos, ‘ethics’, pathos, ‘feelings’. The word ‘pathetic’ actually means ‘able to arouse pathos or empathy’, not like sad or pitiable; that’s our connotation. But thinking about Gemini as logos, you can have a lot of logic, but if there’s no purpose to it, if there’s no ethics involved and you’re not touching people’s hearts then it’s just words for words’ sake, and most people don’t like that for very long. And thinking about what you said, Aerin, Aquarius probably really admires Libra’s ability to get into pathos. Like, “Wow, here I am with this perfect ethical system that would give us utopia and perfect social relationships, and nobody cares,” because Aquarius is up there like, “I have the ethos. And I’m gonna talk to my little buddy, Mercury, over there, and I’m gonna bring you the logos.” And Venus and Libra are over there like, “Yeah, cool. Until you come over here and get the heart, it doesn’t matter to anybody.”
CB: Yeah, or sometimes presentation matters. In order to be able to sell an idea, you have to get people in the door at the very beginning.
AF: Yeah, Libra’s like, “Here’s your great idea, but make it cute.”
BR: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
BR: I don’t know if this is just my brain going, “Hugh Tran reminds me of this.” Hugh Tran’s an astrologer and designer and I’ve chatted with him a little bit about design. Actual design makes the information better. It makes the depth and the veracity. It improves the communication completely irrespective of what information is being conveyed and the particular design methods you employ, but good design makes it better.
CB: Yeah. Even though it’s a common saying that ‘you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover’, on the other hand if your book has a really bad cover, people might not get past that initial point in order to see the information that you’ve collected inside.
AF: Yeah, it makes me think about Aquarius’ concern with accessibility, as well as that sense that there has to be space for an inclusion of others. And Libra can teach Aquarius something about visual accessibility, just like you were saying, Bear. Good design can make something more accessible in many ways.
BR: Makes it more legible, more intelligible, which allows people to use their own discernment and to have more agency and sovereignty. Which I think gets us back into that Saturn-Aquarius-Leo opposition with the support from those little wins or failures of the trine/sextile spots.
AF: And to make something more pleasurable too, like pleasure for pleasure’s sake, which is a beautiful strength of Libra. Anything Saturn-dominant is like, “Well, what’s the point of that? It doesn’t need to feel good.”
BR: Yeah, the correct proportion and relationship of talking or noise or vocal utterances and lack of vocal utterances, that’s how you get music.
AF: Yes, that’s all it is.
CB: I just thought of something also—typography. Typography would be where Libra comes in ‘cause this was something when I was working on my book for like 10 years and I wanted to publish it. I wanted to self-publish it, but I wanted to make it not look like a self-published book. Sometimes when people used to self-publish things, it would look kind of shoddy or not-well-put-together because the person usually doesn’t have any background or specialization in the many different things you need to do in order to put a book together. So one of the things I had to do was research typography and different fonts.
Not only did I want to pick out a font that was visually appealing to read and made it so that the book was a pleasure to read, but also determine things like the spacing of the font and how far apart the different lines are, how many words there should be on a line. Sometimes if it’s too short, if you’re not able to fit enough words on a line then it reads like it’s going too quick vs. if the lines are too long then it feels a little bit too heavy and people’s eyes get tired. But that notion of proportion in spacing and the aesthetics of presenting information is very much a Venus-type thing.
AF: Definitely.
CB: Or Libra-type thing. And then finally the last thing there, before we move on from Libra, is I used the analogy in the Libra episode that Taurus—which is the other sign ruled by Venus—is like a garden outside and Libra is like an art gallery. And I think to continue that, as another air sign, Aquarius is kind of like a science lab. It’s interesting, in our culture, there’s a little bit of a tinge to that when you talk about an art gallery or a science lab compared to, let’s say, a garden—this notion that there’s this sort of artificiality of man-made objects compared to how things are in nature, or how it comes off to us as humans; things that are natural and just arise naturally vs. things that are man-made having this sort of artificial component to them. I’m having a hard time fully articulating what that is, but it seems like a component that comes up with the air signs, especially with Libra and with Aquarius.
AF: Yeah, in Toronto, we have the Science Centre, and it feels like a very Aquarian place. It’s just all these little spaces of innovation and information about innovative initiatives and all those different things.
CB: Yeah, like a history museum or something like that that often has a science wing in it or something like that.
AF: I think that ashrams and monasteries have a kind of Aquarian nature to them as well. These collective spaces that are outside of the dominant ways of living in the world, but also have this tinge of asceticism to them; also spaces that are intended to be in support of the progress of humankind.
CB: That makes sense.
BR: Yeah, it’s funny. I don’t know how much of this analogy I picked up by virtue of being one of your students, but I often describe the difference between Taurus and Libra as Venus is garden vs. Venus is tea room; it’s about socializing in Libra. And in theory a garden is also about socializing, especially if we think back to Medieval Islamic empires, that time period of the garden as a place where you convene, where different types of socializing are permitted. So what is permissible inside of a garden vs. what’s permissible inside the tea room? And then maybe Gemini in that context is like the classroom.
When you’re in the garden, you’re out and about and exploring. I’ve spent some time working with kids and working with kids with food and gardening in particular. It’s the easiest place to get a classroom of kids to be engaged. When there are things that are in nature, and you can eat them, kids are totally enthralled. And so, it’s like the garden becomes this natural classroom if you just have conversations about how one thing relates to another. But you can’t quite do the same thing in a tea room.
CB: Right. Yeah, that’s a really good point. All right, that might provide a good transition point. Now we can move on from the triplicities to talking about the modalities of the fixed signs, the four fixed signs. And that’ll be a good transition to go directly into the comparison between Aquarius and Taurus, with Taurus being the first fixed sign, but it being a fixed earth sign. And we’ve talked a little bit about the contrast between a science lab with Aquarius vs. a garden where you’re growing food with Taurus. So in some of her notes, Camille writes that, “Aquarius’ fixity relates to the intellectual plane, whereas Taurus’ fixity relates to the material plane. Scorpio relates to the interior life or the emotional plane, whereas Leo is fixity of the self and holding onto that which provides identity and purpose, which sort of holds things together or holds you together.”
AF: Yeah, like Bear’s idea of Taurus as a kind of outdoor education. Aquarius would be like the ‘outer space’ education, and Scorpio would be like the education that kids get from having to relate to one another in the classroom.
BR: Okay, if we play with that metaphor then I would think Taurus is the garden, hands-on, kinesthetic lab. In Leo, we’re having a lot of fun and getting really playful about the upcoming harvest and planning the celebration. In Scorpio, we’re fermenting things. And then Aquarius is the lab where we make our glass so that we can for next year, and then the kids get to eat the stuff that they can from the fall and the previous summer or something like that.
AF: Totally. Like how you eat in the middle of winter things that you canned or prepared during the Scorpio harvest. And then also during Aquarius season, all of the seeds that you planted during Scorpio season are starting to gestate a little bit in the earth unseen.
BR: Yeah, yeah, and back in the day you would have gone into your root cellar to get your canned goods. And those canned goods would have been things that you jarred in glass, which is Saturn. So you have that kind of need to go into the lab to figure it out. Or we can think about Aquarius equally as science or like indigenous knowledge systems. So it’s like we’re taking all of this wisdom that we’ve accumulated from generations before us and we’re applying it in a particular way, doing the right thing at the right time, in the right proportion, so that we can make use of this later in the future.
AF: Yeah, the future planning, that’s so perfect.
BR: And I think this is about when you would be looking at your seed catalogs, thinking about getting ready. And even thinking about Taurus, you know, Taurus being associated with the plotting out of the garden also. Do the math and figure out how many seeds can you put in a row, and if I want these plants and these plants, who goes next to each other happily, so that we can avoid the negative consequences of mono-cropping.
CB: If we’re gonna do a school analogy then I would say Taurus would be cooking class, Leo would be theater or drama class, Scorpio would be the psychology class, and Aquarius would be the science lab class.
BR: Yeah.
AF: I love that. I went to an art school and we had to do mime class, which feels like a very Aquarian kind of experience too. And we would do all these exercises where you’re putting your hand against a wall that doesn’t exist. It feels so Aquarian.
CB: Right.
AF: And also, mimes have a correlation with clowns and everything. So science class or mime class.
CB: I like that.
BR: I went to a weird school that was built in the ‘70s, and they tried to make the layout all futuristic or something. So we had these wings that were grouped by themes, so it was like all the science and math classes were in one wing and then PE was near the cafeteria, so it’s like all the Taurus stuff was in one area. And then you go over to the Leo area and there’s the theater and all the different art classes were together. And then you go over to Scorpio and it’s psychology, but also the literature and the poetry and all those other humanities access points. And then, yeah, let’s get super technical in the science and math wing.
AF: Love that.
CB: For sure. All right, is there anything else about the relationship between Aquarius and Taurus that comes to each of you that’s worth mentioning?
BR: I think of the relationship between time and money, especially since Aquarius is making that overcoming square. It’s like, what is money, thinking about Taurus as money, if we can. I think we invented money so that we could make future plans about how to trade food stuff, if I’m understanding the evolution of human technologies correctly. So thinking about that Saturnian understanding of the importance of time, but also, “Let’s say ‘no’ to schlepping everything all over the place and bring the least amount of things that we need, so I’ll get this precious gem from under the ground, and I’ll take it over the water, and I’ll trade it with you,” and that’s really this abstractification of the value of time and the relationship between time and food, or effort and food.
AF: Yeah.
CB: This Taurus-Aquarius square makes me think about some of the contemporary debates about Bitcoin and not having anything that backs it up, so therefore it doesn’t have anything of value behind it so that it’s meaningless; it’s just a token that’s representing worth or value. But then some of the counterarguments are, well, what does any modern currency have backing it up if it’s not tied to the gold standard or things like. It’s just these abstract notions of value and worth and how those things act as something that helps society to exist because of the ability to exchange value, and the value that’s in it is really just whatever society says it is, or what the collective agreement is at that point in time about why that thing is seen as valuable.
AF: Yeah, and that Aquarius doesn’t necessarily care about the resource-oriented value of something because it doesn’t care about human needs. Taurus is like, “Well, we need these things to survive and to live practical lives.” And Aquarius is like, “I don’t need any of that. I can just live off of air. I’ll just become a breatharian and that’s totally fine.”
BR: That makes me wonder about that period in Holland where people were basically just mortgaging their houses and their family fortunes for that one tulip bulb. I wonder if there was a Libra-Saturn-Aquarius-something-or-another going on that created this like, “Well, you know what I really need is beauty. I’m gonna die anyways and I need to see this tulip. Who cares about the house?”
CB: Right.
AF: I love that.
CB: And then finally moving onto the last contrast, which is just Aquarius and Scorpio. What are the similarities vs. what are the tensions between those two signs? Since it’s a water sign that we’re contrasting, with Scorpio vs. Aquarius, one of the themes we’ve come up with a lot is detachment, or sometimes emotional detachment with Aquarius, whereas Scorpio is usually considered to be very different and being extremely emotionally attached to things.
AF: Yeah, Scorpio placements are how we need our connection to others and how that deep, shared sense of experience can be central to human identity. And Aquarius is like, “Well, I don’t need any kind of connection. I can live on a mountain by myself or live remote from the rest of society by myself.” And so, I think it shows the square between ways of connection. Because Aquarius needs some kind of belonging or this larger sense of connection, but not necessarily personal connection, and there are a lot of Aquarians who prefer to be more in a hermit-type experience or more remote from others.
BR: The first thing that jumped to mind was “If I feel it, then it’s real; my feelings are valid; all feelings are valid,” vs. “I think, therefore, I am,” and that showing up in the relational domain. To your point, Aerin, I think we see that show up in thinking about Scorpio as equally crimes of passion and the reason that we have poetry and the reason that we have intense feelings, intense affective processes going on. Part of me is thinking about the fact that they’re both malefic-ruled signs: Scorpio, being the nocturnal sign of Mars, and Aquarius, the diurnal sign of Saturn, and Saturn’s a diurnal planet.
It’s like these are the places where each of those planets really operate well and maybe it says something about the passion and the intensity that actually drives and motivates us to figure out who am I safe with/who am I not safe with, who feels like me/who doesn’t feel like me and then abstracting that into these ideological things or these external aesthetic social markers. “These people dress like that and listen to this music, therefore, they must not be safe, and I really wouldn’t belong with them. They wouldn’t get how I feel. I couldn’t tell them what I really (x, y, z),” if that makes sense.
CB: Yeah, I was thinking of being ruled by malefics with both signs and the rejection or standing outside of social conventions. For example, in Scorpio, sometimes you run into focusing on things that are off-putting or considered morbid to other people. And you almost kind of get a similar dynamic to a certain extent with Aquarius where it’s doing things that are edgy or that rile people up. And I almost think of the crossover between those two as gothic or goth subculture, which has both of those elements of that which is morbid, as well as that which is kind of edgy and deliberately putting yourself on the outskirts of the mainstream as a result of that.
AF: Totally. And both Scorpio and Aquarius’ propensity to welcome death or notions of death, or to simply be very realistic about death as something that’s part of life.
CB: Yeah.
BR: Or the idea—go ahead.
CB: They’re both fixed signs in the middle of those seasons. One is the fixed sign that’s in the middle of the fall season—Scorpio, in the northern hemisphere—when all of the leaves are falling off of the trees, and the plants are kind of like dying, and then the other is the fixed sign that falls in the middle of the winter season, where everything is dead or dormant and cold, and you’re just dealing with the finality of being in the middle of that lowest portion of the seasonal cycle and dynamic.
BR: Makes me think about a couple of different little euphemisms and turns of phrases that we use like ‘hot takes’, that seems very Scorpio, vs. ‘ice cold’, ‘salty’, those are Saturn words. Yeah, the way that either one of those signs would say, “The people who know the real me are the people that I can show my actual anger, show my intensity to who can take my trauma and not be phased by it, not be scared by my Scorpio experiences.” Or maybe on the Aquarius side it’s more like, “The people who really know me are the people who can hear my most misanthropic, contrarian takes and know that I still love people and that I still have a heart. I’m not just some anti-human robot.”
AF: Yeah, both signs have their own ways of being ‘othered’ or scapegoated. But the thing that remedies that for Scorpio is, like you said, to be able to show full expression or full emotion. And for Aquarius, it’s more about being understood. It’s like, “I need someone to get me or to be able to speak my language.”
BR: Yeah. Or like feeling safe when you can do full catharsis in view of someone; like safety coming from profound depth of intimacy in Scorpio vs. safety coming from ‘you give me space’.
AF: Yes.
CB: And both also, as fixed signs, seem to have almost a tendency to take things to the utmost extreme or to be very serious about things. It just makes me think of a friend of mine, Mika, who said that at bars one of their favorite things to say to Scorpios is, “It’s not that deep; what you’re saying is not that deep,” just to get a rise out of them. If you want to get a rise out of a Scorpio, you say, “That’s not that deep,” which is pretty good. My eye twitched when I heard that. But I think with Aquarius, you might run into a similar thing. If Aquarius just outlined this broad system for the future, or ideology, or the thing they’ve been researching intensely, and you said something like that you might run into a similar issue.
BR: Yeah.
AF: Yeah, just be like, “That’s not that insightful.” Or like, “I don’t know. It’s not that intelligent.”
BR: Yeah, you’re wasting your time. It doesn’t matter that much.
CB: Right.
AF: Yeah. Or, I already did that.
CB: That’s not that unique. You’re like, “Other people have done that,” or “That’s the same as this thing,” or something like that.
BR: Yeah, I think that might be the ultimate burn. Like, “Oh, that idea. You mean like this thing?” and then you show that person the thing that they didn’t know that their work was derivative of.
CB: Right. Yeah, that somebody did that like a hundred years ago.
AF: I already feel attacked.
CB: All right, let’s pause right here ‘cause I know we have a few other signs to compare.
[break]
CB: All right, we’re back from another break. And another apropos keyword that’s relevant here for Aquarius and Scorpio, both being fixed signs, is ‘longevity’ or ‘staying power’. They’re slow to get going, like most fixed signs, but once they get warmed up, they sort of keep going and last forever. There’s a greater sense of permanence or trying to create something that will stick around for a long time. All right, so let’s move onto other contrasts here as we’re going through. We did the modalities. We did the quadruplicities. All that’s left then is, first, the sextile signs. So first, we talked a little bit about Aquarius and Sagittarius. But are there other things that are worth mentioning here at this point in terms of the connection between those two? One of them being ruled by Saturn, the other by Jupiter. One being a fixed air sign and the other being a mutable fire sign.
BR: I think about the two, both in the context of philosophy, law, society, and the different social norms and legal norms that kind of bookend what makes a state, what makes society a civilization vs. a cultural group.
CB: For sure. In both, there’s an optimism or a future orientation. I mean, Sag is the more optimistic one, but both of them have this looking ahead to the future-type quality in some ways.
AF: Yeah, and Sagittarius is where the vision starts, whereas Aquarius might be more concerned about how to bring that vision into being.
CB: That makes sense. Both are a little bit more extroverted socially and interested in social things to some extent.
BR: Yeah. Yeah, thinking about the diurnal masculine qualities as being like upwards and outwards. And then something about the—the thought ran away from me. Maybe coffee will bring it back.
CB: Yeah. And let’s see—so one of the contrasts obviously when we went from Sag to Capricorn is the transition from a fundamental optimism to a sort of pessimism. What happens though when we get to Aquarius, when we switch? I know that it’s future-oriented, but it’s still ruled by Saturn. So there’s still a heaviness or a restrictiveness or a critical function with Aquarius that is a lot different than the Jupiterian nature of Sagittarius. And yet, it’s a little bit more complementary than it might be otherwise, more than Capricorn.
AF: Yeah, I mean, I think the diurnal quality gives them this opportunity of speaking the same language in a way, or this sense that there’s some kind of shared understanding between the signs, but that maybe whatever is sparked through the optimism of Sagittarius can sustain itself a little better when we move into Aquarius.
CB: Yeah, that’s really good. Like more sustaining and being able to stick with things instead of just being spread too thin or being sort of all over the place in terms of Sagittarius.
AF: I think Aquarius helps it choose in a way.
BR: Yeah.
CB: And also, more of a philosophical or ideological orientation as well. Perhaps it could be something where they get along especially if their views are complementary.
BR: In thinking that Saturn is the cooperating triplicity lord of the fire signs, it does have more affinity for Sagittarius than it seems at first glance. And the same is true for Jupiter and Aquarius. So perhaps there is some kind of implicit friendliness for the ways in which philosophy and law support society. But also, the kind of restricting quality or retentive quality of Saturn when applied to law and philosophy makes it actually stick. Like a law for a law’s sake or a cool philosophical idea that doesn’t have any practical grounding or isn’t contained just kind of gets you floating off in space in the same way that saying ‘yes’ to everything means you don’t actually end up doing anything. The ‘no’ has to happen for the ‘yes’ to mean anything.
AF: Yeah, too many ideas means we don’t actually have the focus or the sustain to actually bring any of them to fruition.
BR: Yeah, thinking about Sagittarius as thinking, “Hey, wouldn’t it be great? You know, I think this is true and it means this. So wouldn’t it be great if?” And then Aquarius comes and says, “Those first two ideas, no, that didn’t make any sense. There’s no logic there. The third one, that one really made sense. Let’s stick with that. Tell me more.” Until Saturn comes and says, “Stop. No more new ideas. Keep this one. Do it longer.” then it doesn’t stick.
AF: Aquarius is the editor of Sagittarius.
CB: I think having a lot of Sag and Aquarius placements would probably be really good for forming a cult. ‘Cause Sagittarius is that philosophical inspiration of you have an idea, a religious idea, or a philosophy, but Aquarius is like, “Let’s create a community out of that which is entirely oriented around that.”
BR: That brought my thought back. Sagittarius and Aquarius are like, “Upwards, outwards, let’s go connect to divinity. Let’s go connect with the ultimate real truth of reality.” vs. Capricorn and Pisces going, “There is transcendent reality, let’s bring this down to earth.” Down and in vs. up and out.
AF: Yeah, the pursuit of what’s out there is the business of Aquarius and Sag.
CB: For sure. All right, that’s pretty good for those two signs that are in sextile. So moving along, the other sextile sign relative to Aquarius is Aries, which is a cardinal fire masculine sign or diurnal sign ruled by Mars. So in what ways are these two signs complementary or different?
BR: Not wasting any time and making a whole life philosophy out of that imperative.
CB: Yeah.
AF: Yeah, Aquarius is very concerned with getting it right and making sure that you have all of the information before you take any steps. And Aries does not care about any of that and will take all the steps before even considering whether any of them might have felt right.
CB: Yeah, one of the major keywords and themes that came up with Aries was ‘speed’ and ‘leaping first’ before necessarily thinking things out. I know that’s not gonna be typical of Aquarius and Saturn.
BR: Been thinking a lot about Saturn falling in Aries and playing around with the idea that planets in their fall or detriment are responsible for certain aspects of that sign rather than just struggling with the nature of the sign. I mean, both are true. But thinking about Saturn being responsible for the parts of Aries that make us not waste time, I’ve been thinking about that just talking to more Saturn in Aries clients over the last year and hearing this consistent theme of the worst possible thing to do would be to waste time. But as we were discussing earlier, Saturn deals in the currency of time, so you can’t shortcut that process. You can’t make time happen faster than it actually happens.
So I almost imagine Aquarius and Aries relate so much. That kind of contrarian, ‘all razm’, as my grandfather would say, like getting in a good dig; it’s dark humor with a good intention, but it’s a little spicy and pokey. But both of those signs are kind of looking at the other and being like, “You’re the one wasting time. Look at you sitting there trying to get all the facts and figures, taking forever ‘cause it’s so serious,” and Aquarius looking over there being like, “You’re gonna do everything first. You don’t want to ask somebody if somebody tried that before and it worked or didn’t?” But they’re really on the same page. They both want to do it as efficiently and correctly as possible, as soon as possible because the future is now, or the moment that mattered was two minutes ago.
CB: Yeah, the importance of now in order to create a better future. It’s like that saying or that proverb that ‘the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second-best time is right now.’ That has very Aries/Aquarius vibes. All right, that’s pretty good. Definitely tensions though in terms of impatience sometimes with Aries vs. patience to see these out over a very long span of time that might stretch centuries with Aquarius.
AF: Yeah, Aries is not concerned with the big picture. It’s an impulse. It’s a response to something that is just imminent in the moment, whereas Aquarius wants to make sure that that can fit into the context of, like you said, centuries or the big, big picture of something.
CB: Yeah, for sure. All right, so moving one, that’s the sextile signs. So that leaves us then with the signs that are in aversion, I believe, which we’ve already talked about Capricorn and Aquarius and Pisces and Aquarius. So all that’s left then is Aquarius and Cancer, which are two signs which share no qualities in common, and Aquarius and Virgo, which are the other signs that share no qualities in common. So why don’t we start with Cancer, which is a nocturnal or feminine cardinal water sign that’s ruled by the Moon. And in that way it almost couldn’t be more different from Aquarius, which is a fixed air masculine or diurnal sign that’s ruled by Saturn.
AF: Yeah, thinking about the aversion of Aquarius with Cancer and Virgo feels like some of the most distinct qualities of the sign to me because Cancer and Virgo are essentially very human signs, and Aquarius is quite literally in aversion to being human a lot of the time. But with Aquarius it’s like the aversion to feelings and needs and deep relationality, and Cancer says, “Okay, well, we all have needs, we all have feelings, we all need connection. We all need to be nurtured.” And Aquarius is like, “Eww, I don’t need any of those things. I don’t need nurturing. I don’t have feelings. I am beyond those things.” And so, there’s a difficult conversation between the signs for that reason.
CB: Yeah, for sure. I like that with Aquarius as the alien or the artificial intelligence of the zodiac and how it relates to Cancer, which needs food and water and emotions or other things like that that are very human qualities to survive.
AF: Cancer and Virgo are thinking and feeling, and Aquarius is like, “I am beyond all of those things.”
CB: Right. It reminds me of a Star Trek episode, Star Trek: The Next Generation, where they had Data who was the cyborg—or he’s like a robot, artificial intelligence. But at one point his inventor develops a chip that they implant in him that lets him feel emotions, and all of a sudden he can feel everything and has emotions for everything, and it starts messing with him and causing some problems. Because all of a sudden it’s bringing in this extra dimension and data set into his actions that are causing him to act differently and create some drama. But I feel like that’s kind of what you get with Cancer-Aquarius combinations.
BR: Yeah, thinking about the Moon, the word I use the most for the Moon is ‘digesting’. The Moon is there to digest the things that our solar awareness brings to our attention and assimilate that as an experience. And Aquarius is busy saying, “No. No, thank you. Not now. The future.” You can’t eat in the future. You can think about food in the future, but eating can only ever happen in the present moment. If you even try to breathe or talk too fast before you finish chewing then you start choking; it’s like 0% in the cards. So I think that Cancer-Aquarius aversion really highlights the ways and which limits and boundaries. If we think about the blind spots not being necessarily something that’s bad, but a thing that the other sign can’t see, Aquarius can’t see how important it is that we nurture ourselves, that we feed ourselves, that we be somatically-grounded in our bodies. It’s like the dissociation vs. association; being embodied and somatically-associated.
So I think about those two in that kind of stark opposition, whereas for some reason—maybe it’s because Mercury rules Virgo and has triplicity in Aquarius, where the Moon doesn’t benefit in that way—I can see Virgo and Aquarius somehow going, “I don’t get why I get you, but I do in some way.” And it’s like the technology, it’s the process, it’s that future orientation. I think of Virgo being like, “Cool, I have all this grain that I’ve harvested, but it’s not anything I can do anything with. Nobody wants to chew on raw cereal. It’s very unpleasant.” And so, I think Aquarius can be like, “Yeah, I don’t really want to eat anyways. And I definitely don’t want to eat that. You’re gonna do something that will make it more appealing to eat? Sure. I’ll entertain that notion. I’ll stick around and wait and see what happens after you’re done grinding this forever.”
CB: I like those keywords you mentioned of ‘gathering’ and ‘nourishing’ as good Cancer keywords. And it also makes me think of some actual debate that’s happening right now about AI and artificial intelligence. It’s like an intelligence but it doesn’t have a body. And whether it needs a body or whether something needs a body in order to truly develop consciousness and self-awareness, and some of the things that come with having a body or feeling embodied, which can include things like self-preservation or fear of pain, an aversion to negative states of negative embodiment and all sorts of things like that is just an interesting question. That’s the thing with AI; you can have an intelligence or consciousness that doesn’t have a physical awareness or physical manifestation.
BR: I wonder if it has something to do with time. I think it was Elodie St-Onge Aubut—I do not speak French, I hope that was at least a decent effort—along with Chris Reppucci, last week in a talk about magical approaches to working with Saturn for the International Academy of Astrological Magic, or Association of Astrological Magic, they were talking about the word ‘obstetric’ that shows up with respect to Saturn. I think it’s illuminating this connection between Cancer, the Moon, birth, womb, babies, classical associations there, and Saturn.
CB: Diana actually used that keyword in the last episode as well.
BR: Yeah, obstetric, and that standing in opposition. And there’s a bunch of different ways that we can think about Saturnian retentive qualities—binding, stopping, slowing—but then also severing and releasing being associated with the process of birth and incarnation and embodiment. I think it just depends on which direction they’re looking and who’s looking at who and what they’re talking about in terms of Cancer or Aquarius, the Moon or Saturn.
AF: That does make me think about birth and the different modes of expression with these signs too, where Cancer is like, “Birth happens in this particular way, and children are breastfed by their parents, and there’s a sort of bodily experience of it,” but Aquarius is like, “Birth can happen in many ways.” Children can be conceived and gestated and fed and nourished in many ways that might not be directly from a birthing parent or someone who’s been physically connected to the birth experience itself,” and the aversion between those two perspectives as well.
CB: I was just reading the other day—I didn’t know this ‘cause I’ve never raised a child—but I didn’t know that you’re not supposed to just give a baby water for the first six months. They either need to drink breast milk, which would be Cancer, or they need to be fed formula, which would be Aquarius, which is a synthetic form of breast milk, trying to replicate something that was organic using the same or even better nutrients. That might be part of the contrast here as well.
BR: I see Virgo standing there too, thinking about not necessarily the field—unless you’re using soy formula—but going to domesticated plants and animals. Goat milk, I think, was a really common one prior to formula being invented. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense finding those other ways of filling those needs and a mercurial, substitution process there.
AF: Oh, yeah, didn’t Hermes steal a whole bunch of cattle? And we get a lot of nourishment from cows milk as well, so that makes sense.
CB: Yeah—go ahead.
BR: I was gonna say, yeah, he used their guts and a tortoise shell from an unfortunate tortoise to make the first lyres. So maybe there’s that Venus connection. Hermes is like, “Yeah, Taurus and Libra, I have something to say to both of you or something to give each of you.”
CB: Yeah, so let’s formally transition into that final sign, which is Virgo—which is a feminine or nocturnal mutable earth sign ruled by Mercury—and its contrast with Aquarius. So we have some complementary quality there in that we’ve got the Mercury connection and the communicative connection. But Virgo’s a much more grounded sign because of that earthy quality, and it’s much more organic in its orientation, which I think is different because Aquarius has the more sterile sort of component.
AF: Yeah, and there’s a sense that Virgo is about the process itself, and Aquarius prefers to skip the process and simply arrive in the thing. So Virgo is process-oriented, Aquarius is beyond process.
BR: Something about you saying ‘sterile’, Chris, made me think about the process of brewing. Yeah, you need that sterilizing power of Aquarius. If you put all the grain in the vat from the field, and you haven’t sterilized that container, you don’t want to drink the beer that comes out of that. Maybe there’s also something there about Saturn and Mercury at least understanding one another on some level that yields Aquarius wanting the future to already be here, like already being attuned to what could be; giving the patience and wherewithal to repeat the process, to undergo the process of iteration. That’s another Virgo word that I like, to do ‘iteration’ until gleaning the perfect process, the correct process in a way where you can then go translate it to the next generation, so you’re not just endlessly repeating trial and error, but actually having some sort of cultural traditions around those processes and what they mean to society or what they do for society.
CB: Yeah, that makes me think that a place that would represent an Aquarius-Virgo crossover might be an apothecary. On the one hand, you’ve got people that went out for many, many years and just collected different herbs and tried different herbs and saw what the different medicinal potential was of different plants and flowers and things like that. But then eventually from that you get this larger tradition and repository of these things that had been passed down for generations until you see the end result of that being a place that both collects all these different herbs and plants that can be used for medicinal purposes, but also has people working there that understand all of those different things and what the different combinations and mixtures can do in order to help people.
BR: Yeah.
AF: Yeah, and Virgo’s very much a sign of learning and the intake of information, like that process of going out and learning about herbs in a very tactile way. But then Aquarius is very much about expertise and the perfection of understanding. And so, you go into an apothecary and you’re consulting the expert on herbs or someone who has cultivated a broader kind of learning around it.
BR: Yeah. Yeah, even thinking about alchemy. The image of alchemy kind of popped into my head when you said apothecary. Yeah, you go to the herbalist who’s really focused on the plant material and the process and the physical side of it, getting into that small intestine Virgo connection, vs. somebody who’s gone off and left Virgo and decided, “I’m gonna go hang out where Virgo can’t see into thoroughly intellectual abstract theory.” Aside from the body, what’s really going on there? And that’s when you get somebody who’s like, “Oh, no, this isn’t about pigment, it’s not chemistry. It’s actually about transmuting lead into gold and that’s a metaphor for this internal process.” I think you can see that there too.
CB: For sure. That makes sense. And the last imagery, if people aren’t familiar with an apothecary, a modern analogy would be like a pharmacy or a pharmacist. You go in and you order some medicine or something, and they’ll mix it together right there for you. But they’re people that are generally working in a sterile environment and have lab coats, so there’s kind of like this distance from it. But it’s also got an element that’s very connected in a bodily sense with something that will have a major impact on you to either help or the opposite if you take certain substances.
All right, well, that was actually the last combination that we haven’t crossed, so I think that’s it. And I think we’ve covered all the sign comparisons, and we’ve made it to the end of this very long fixed sign episode. So thank you both for joining me today for this. This was amazing.
BR: Thank you for having me.
AF: It was so much fun. It was a really amazing, rich conversation.
BR: Yeah, it was so great.
CB: On this New Moon in Aquarius day that we chose. Here, let me just put up the chart because I didn’t record the time. But I know we started with 28 or 29 Taurus rising today. So I just wanted to put up our electional chart for the day to document what we used for that, which would be right about there. Perfect.
AF: We have our beautiful Venus bonifying Saturn as well.
CB: Yeah, and the Moon applying to that nice conjunction with Venus. Awesome. So this was great. What do each of you have coming up in the future? Or where can people find out more information about your work? Aerin, what do you have coming up?
AF: Always consultations. Lots of ongoing consultations, which I love, love, love so much. And a few months ago I launched my family chart reading offering that I’ve been doing, which has been incredibly deep and rich, mapping out up to eight charts together of different family members and looking at some of the intergenerational themes there, so I’ve really been enjoying those. And not announced yet, but I will have some offerings coming up late spring, early summer, probably around Pluto in Aquarius. And also, I’m going to be making some workshop offerings out of the intergenerational astrology work that I’ve been doing. So you can find me at AerinFogel.com and sign up for my mailing list if you want to hear more about that, or look for QueenofSwords on Twitter and Instagram.
CB: Nice. All right, Bear, what about you?
BR: Got a lot going on this year. In the next month or so, I haven’t pinned down the exact date, I should be teaching a local in-person class on working with the planetary days and practical astrological magic here in Oakland. And I’m working on creating a parallel online course that I’ll be launching later in the year. I’ve also got consultations as well. For the rest of this month, until the 31st—so we’ll see when this gets dropped—I’m doing some Jupiter lightning strike sessions while Jupiter is in his own terms of Aries, talking to folks about what the Jupiter in Aries transit has in store for their chart, and also looking a little bit about the Lot of Victory and what other timing techniques that pertain to Jupiter have to say about someone’s chart; taking a deep dive there through planetary days special focus sessions as well.
I’ve got my new newsletter Betterthans and B-Sides, looking at making the best out of bad timing. So on the day that you shouldn’t elect anything, but you have to do something, what charts can you use? And then I’m doing a magazine that will be dropping at the end of this year. But there’s a bunch of other things I haven’t quite announced. I’ll be talking about a book soon too. So lots of big stuff in store. You can find me at BearRyver.com. And you can find me on Insta and Twitter @BearRyver and YouTube at AstrologerBearRyver.
CB: Nice.
AF: Excited for your book.
BR: Thank you.
CB: Yeah, me too. So I’ll put a link to both of your websites in the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website in the entry for this episode. So people can go there to find out more information about both of your work and both of your consultations. So thanks a lot for joining me today.
AF: Thanks so much for having us, Chris.
BR: Thank you for having me.
CB: All right, thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time.
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